Prototyping In Design Thinking

Dr B V S RAO
Left right human brain concept.
Creative part and logic part with
social and business doodle
brain, art, illustration, human, design
• “Ihave not failed. I’ve just
found 10,000 ways that won’t
work.”

• – Thomas Edison, American

inventor.
• What is prototyping?
• Prototyping in a project is creating a sample or
model of a project to test the concept.
• What Is Prototyping
• Prototypes are early samples, models,
or releases of products built to test a
concept or process.
• There are many contexts in which
semantics can be used, for example, in
design, electronics, and software
programming.
• Generally, prototypes are used by
system analysts and users to improve
the precision of a new design.
• Prototyping is an essential step in the Design
Thinking process and is often used in the final
testing phase. Every product has a target
audience and is designed to solve their
problems in some way. To assess whether a
product really solves its users' problems,
designers create an almost-working model or
mock-up of the product, called a prototype, and
test it with prospective users and stakeholders.
Thus, prototyping allows designers to test the
practicability of the current design and
potentially investigate how trial users think and
feel about the product. It enables proper testing
and exploring design concepts before too many
resources get used.
• A prototype is a product built to test ideas and
changes until it resembles the final product.
You can mock-up every feature and interaction
in your prototype as in your fully developed
product, check if your idea works, and verify
the overall user-experience (UX) strategy.
• Prototyping allows you to build simple, small-
scale prototypes of your products, and use
them to observe, record, and assess user
performance levels or the users' general
behavior and reactions to the overall design.
Designers can then make appropriate
refinements or possible alterations in the right
direction.
• Some of the common types of prototyping that
you can use include:
• Sketches and Diagrams. ...
• Paper Interface. ...
• Storyboards. ...
• Role-Playing. ...
• Physical Models. ...
• Wizard of Oz Prototypes. ...
• User-Driven Prototypes.
• Prototypes can be of any form, from simple
sketches and storyboards to rough paper
prototypes and even role-playing prototypes that
enact a service offering. They do not need to be
complete products – in fact, you can prototype a
part of a product to test that part of your
solution. Often, prototypes are quick and rough -
designed for early-stage testing and
understanding – and at times full-formed and
detailed – aimed for pilot trials towards the
project's final stages.
• What is Prototype in Design
• The purpose of a prototype in design thinking
is to test products (and product ideas) prior to
launch. Prototypes are simulations or samples
of final products that are used as testing tools.
It is intended to test products (and product
ideas) before investing a great deal of time
and resources into creating a sellable product
• Why We Need to Prototype
• One of the key aspects of prototyping is
that it generates empathy for
prospective consumers. In this respect,
designing software or designing
products for human use are not much
different. Any product designed without
understanding the customer's needs can
result in unnecessary features, poor
designs, and a host of problems.
• With prototyping, you can enjoy various
benefits like:
• Evaluate Technical Feasibility
• Creating a prototype makes it possible to
concretize an idea and assess which
features pose difficulty in implementation.
Prototyping can thus identify unanticipated
physical, technical, or financial
constraints.
• Enhance Website Quality
• A well-designed prototype will enable you
to:
• Conduct testing for site usability
• Inspect site navigation
• Conveniently access information on the
site
• Effectively Present Idea to Customers
• Prototyping makes it possible to present your future
product to potential customers before the actual
launch of the product. It could also allow you to
devise your marketing strategies better and start pre-
sales.

• Reduced Risks
• Projects with a complete prototyping process are at
lower risk than projects without prototyping. This is
because prototyping directly affects project resources,
time, and budget. Through prototyping, it is possible
to estimate the resources needed and time for
development.
• Simulate the Future Product
• The most important advantage of prototyping is
that it creates a model of the final product. It
can help lure customers to invest in the product
prior to any resource allocation for
implementation. You can discover design errors
and check their correctness before going into
production.

• Provide Focused Feedback

• Exposing the prototype helps to get focused
customer feedback on the desired qualities in
the product. This feedback is critical to
understand the needs and expectations of users,
business requirements and gain a clear idea of
what the product is headed for.
• Planning
• Through prototyping, the design team gets
essential information that helps them to plan
out the implementation. A prototype helps
build user stories and emphasize on user
needs. This brings substantial benefits to the
scrum teams.

• Quick and Easy

• A designer can quickly develop a ready-to-
implement prototype even from a simple
idea on paper if they understand the logic
and functionality of the product.
• Types of Prototyping
• Some of the common types of prototyping
that you can use include:

• Sketches and Diagrams

• Perhaps the most basic form of prototyping,
sketching, requires minimal effort and does
not necessarily require artistic drawing skills
to serve its purpose. Use sketches to begin
the process of conceptualizing and building a
new product and share the concept with
teammates for more ideas and discussions.
• Paper Interface
• Digital products, especially websites,
mobile apps, web services, and other
screen-related products, require a
range of prototyping methods enroute
to the final design and development.
• Paper interfaces prove to be handy for
early-stage prototyping for digital
products. You can sketch paper
interfaces or draw and cut out usable
parts of a user interface like a drop-
down menu or text field.
• Storyboards
• Storyboarding is an excellent way of telling
stories and guiding targeted customers through
a user experience.
• A technique to be used for early prototyping,
storyboards allow you to visualize how users
would experience a problem or product and
present it in a series of images or sketches.
Stories help us gather information on users,
tasks, and goals while at the same time evoking
new ideas through collaboration with other
designers.
• Drawing out a user's experience helps us better
understand their world and to think from their
perspective.
• Role-Playing
• Role-playing or experiential prototyping
enables designers to explore situations
within the system that you're targeting
physically.
• Role-playing can be best used in capturing
and enacting the user's experience of using a
product or service.
• Consider simulating their experience to gain
an empathic understanding of users.
• You can create props, use objects and audio
simulations to imitate the user environment.
• Wizard of Oz Prototypes
• Prototypes with faked functions that you can
use to test users are called Wizard of Oz
Prototypes.
• Like in the wizard of Oz story where the wizard
creates an ominous, deceptive appearance from
behind a screen – this prototype allows you to
mimic certain aspects of your product to save
time and resources. For example, interactivity
that comes from a human and not an algorithm
can be tweaked such that users believe the
latter is the case. The most famous example of
Wizard of Oz Prototypes is a digital system
prototype, where the user is tricked into
believing that the system responses are
computer-generated when they are human-
controll
• User-Driven Prototypes
• A user-driven prototype does not test on
users but allows the user to create some
design, so you learn more about their
thinking.
• This type of prototyping adds to the benefits
of design thinking.
• Its purpose is not to use the user-generated
solutions but to use their designs to gain
empathy with them or fine-tune your
product according to their ideas.
• Digital Prototyping gives conceptual design,
engineering, manufacturing, and sales and
marketing departments the ability to virtually
explore a complete product before it's built.
Industrial designers, manufacturers, and
engineers use Digital Prototyping to design,
iterate, optimize, validate, and visualize their
products digitally throughout the product
development process. Innovative digital
prototypes can be created via CAutoD through
intelligent and near-optimal iterations, meeting
multiple design objectives (such as maximised
output, energy efficiency, highest speed and
cost-effectiveness), identifying multiple figures
of merit, and reducing development gearing and
time-to-market.
• Marketers also use Digital Prototyping to
create photorealistic renderings and
animations of products prior to
manufacturing.
• Companies often adopt Digital Prototyping
with the goal of improving communication
between product development stakeholders,
getting products to market faster, and
facilitating product innovation.
• Digital Prototyping goes beyond simply
creating product designs in 3D.
• It gives product development teams a way
to assess the operation of moving parts, to
determine whether or not the product will
fail, and see how the various product
components interact with subsystems—
either pneumatic or electric..
• By simulating and validating the real-
world performance of a product design
digitally, manufacturers often can
reduce the number of physical
prototypes they need to create before a
product can be manufactured, reducing
the cost and time needed for physical
prototyping.
• Many companies use Digital Prototyping
in place of, or as a complement to,
physical prototyping
• What Are Wireframes?
• A wireframe is a schematic or
blueprint that is useful for helping
you, your programmers and
designers think and communicate
about the structure of the software
or website being built.