How to Use Interactive Prototypes to Achieve Quality Without Sacrificing Velocity

Use interactive prototypes to validate ideas and assumptions, get full stakeholder buy-in, and minimize rework.

With any new product design and development project, organizations often face the impulse to rush something -- anything -- into production with working code. You might hear variations on these themes:

• We need to demonstrate progress to the executives.
• It’ll be easier to get feedback and buy-in from everyone with a fully functional site or app.
• We can always revise it later.

Lokion has worked with many organizations who pushed out a partially baked site or app in response to arguments like these. But once in production, inertia sets in. Business owners are told it’s too expensive and time-consuming to incorporate critical new end-user feedback into the product. Internal stakeholders sour on the product because their buy-in wasn’t sought. Developers muddle through without clear guidance on business goals or customer needs. In some cases, “revising it later” means limping along for years with a suboptimal experience -- all while competitors rush past them with a superior product.

Fortunately, there’s a way to demonstrate progress, get feedback and buy-in, and revise quickly -- all without the time and expense of coding. Interactive prototypes offer these advantages and more in going to market with a fully functional and highly usable product.

A prototype is an interactive model of a site or app that simulates the final product's functionality. It allows users to navigate through the product as if they were using the actual software, but with just enough interactivity to provide a lifelike experience and elicit useful feedback. These prototypes help stakeholders understand the product's flow and give them a good sense of what the final product will feel like.

Why use prototypes?

Prototyping allows your organization to validate ideas and assumptions early in the product design and development process, gather well-informed feedback, get full stakeholder buy-in, and minimize the need for later rework -- all with manageable commitments of time, money, and resources. The end result is a product that better meets user needs and business goals.

Interactive prototypes are incredibly useful in addressing needs like these:

• User testing: This is arguably the most important use case for prototypes. It allows UX designers to test how users interact with a product before any real development begins. These tests can identify potential design flaws, improve the overall user experience, and validate design choices.
• Stakeholder engagement: Prototypes help stakeholders visualize and understand a proposed product in a way that is more engaging and informative than static images or a written proposal. Prototypes are a powerful tool to communicate vision and gather feedback, eliminating potential misunderstandings and increasing buy-in.
• Developer handoff:  An interactive prototype can serve as a guide for developers to understand exactly how the product should look and function. This means less back-and-forth between the design and development teams.
  Some prototyping tools like Figma can make the developer handoff process smoother and reduce front-end development time by allowing users to:
  -Inspect design elements in order to easily gather specs and export assets
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Low or high fidelity?

Not every prototype has to be pixel-perfect and production-ready. You can increase velocity even more by choosing between low- and high-fidelity prototypes based on the project's stage, your objectives, and available resources. Here's how to choose:

• Low-fidelity prototypes are ideal for early stages of the design process. They help outline the structure and flow of a product while minimizing any distractions caused by aesthetic details. They generally lack detailed colors and content, focusing instead on functionality, behavior, and priority of screen elements. When you’re ideating and refining core functionalities and flows, low-fidelity prototypes help facilitate quick iterations based on initial feedback.
• High-fidelity prototypes are more polished and include detailed design elements, interactions, and transitions that mimic the final product's look and feel. Use these later in the design process, once the basic structure and flow have been established and tested. High-fidelity prototypes are excellent for conducting more detailed user tests, demonstrating the product to stakeholders, and guiding developers. Since they’re more time-consuming and costly to create, it's best to employ them only when you're confident about the product’s design and direction.

Since prototyping is an iterative process, you’ll generally use both low- and high-fidelity prototypes in a project lifecycle: Start with low-fidelity prototypes, collect feedback, refine the design, and then move to high-fidelity prototypes as your design matures. And of course, these iterations at the prototype stage are cheaper and quicker to implement than changes made after development has begun. 

Which prototyping tools to use?

The marketplace for prototyping tools is crowded, but here are a few notes to get you started in selecting the right tool for your organization's needs:

• Figma is useful for both low- and high-fidelity prototypes. A large and active user community provides many templates, plugins, and training resources. The learning curve is steep, so Figma is best for organizations with dedicated UX/UI team members.
• Balsamiq and UXPin offer more approachable prototyping tools with less of a learning curve, making them a good choice for for business users to create useful low-fidelity prototypes without dedicated UX/UI resources.

When shopping for prototyping tools, look for the right mix of per-seat price, learning curve, level of fidelity, robust support for collaboration, how much complexity you can build in modeling interactions, user testing capabilities, developer handoff features, and support for a library of prototype elements and templates to give you a head start on new projects.