A Quick, Effective Guide to Digital Rapid Prototyping

Product development, both physical and digital, is an extensive process. But among the many processes, there are certain pre-development steps that are considered pivotal to a flawless development process. Prototype development for digital products (or any product for that matter) is one of them.

Rapid prototyping can help the stakeholders to stitch the gap between vision and reality by quickly conceptualizing the ideas and getting a real peek into the future of the mobile app.

Initially, prototyping was considered a bottleneck but owing to the factors of modern times including the cut-throat competition and the availability of prototyping technologies, it has now become a critical pre-development phase.

A prototype can be anything, right from a rough sketch to a 2D animated print to a 3D model. Whatever the form, product prototyping follows certain principles and offers several benefits.

This article is a quick guide to rapid prototyping development and explores the necessary aspects of it like what, why, and how.

What is Rapid Prototyping?

The term rapid prototyping has emerged from the manufacturing sector. In this sector, product designers employ rapid prototyping to create a model based on the assessment of needs and requirements. The prototype is subjected to several tests before the actual production takes place.

In the digital world, rapid prototyping amounts to the same thing. It refers to the creation of a scaled-down version of any digital product like a website, an application, or a complex software system (or a piece of it). For UX/UI designers, rapid prototyping serves as an ideal way to chart real-time interaction and experience of the users and get validation from the stakeholders as well.

To sum up, rapid prototyping is the process of fabricating a mock version of a digital product based on its conceptual ideas. Rapid prototyping aims to speed up the development process by conceptualizing the ideas, addressing the many challenges of the product design and features, finding viable solutions, and fine-tuning the product based on feedback.

Why is it Needed?

The need for prototyping rose with the need to check the feasibility of concepts. Since the actual app needed to be more than just assumptions, prototyping helped stakeholders as well as developers to churn out workable methodologies and handle the other issues head-on. But the other reasons why rapid prototyping is required and important are enlisted below.

Time-Saving

The essence of rapid prototyping lies in speeding up the overall development process with minimum errors. In rapid prototyping, the priority is given to the must-have features that have the maximum impact on end-users. For instance, if prototyping is being done for a music app, then features like play, pause, fast forward, rewind, and search buttons should be designed and tested at priority since they find maximum use.

Finding the Problems

Getting a grip on the problems at the early stage can help in saving resources, time and effort. This is where mobile app prototyping services fit in. With rapid prototyping, designers and developers can detect problematic elements on both visual and functional fronts. The functioning of the buttons, their placements, the fonts, colors, interface, etc. are all fashioned and tested to allow the preliminary problems to surface.

Creative Experimenting

One of the biggest perks of rapid prototyping is the freedom to experiment as much as one wants. The initial prototype might not be up to the mark but the good thing about rapid prototyping is that designers and developers can experiment as much as they want with their creativity and coding respectively. This navigation of problems can in turn lead to the discovery of innovative alternatives.

Getting Real-Time Feedback

The chief objective of any website, web or mobile app, or software is to serve the end-users in the best possible ways; failing to do so can be catastrophic. With rapid prototyping, stakeholders as well as designers can gather invaluable insights from real-time users. It acts as a remarkable strategy to iterate through the design and bring out a polished version that caters to the requirements of the end users.

Types of Prototypes

Before we look at the common steps of prototyping, it’s important to take a gander at the two main types of prototypes – low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes because a lot of things depend on the type of prototype being developed including the overall time taken to create the prototype, tools to be used, the features to be included and the iterating process.

- Low-fidelity: Low-fidelity prototypes are the ones that are sketched or drawn on paper or digital wireframes with the basic flowchart of features and designs. It is the most basic form of rapid prototyping to represent the ideas and chart the user flow. These prototypes lack content or color and their interface is designed low-tech that includes only the most basic things like layouts and navigational flows.

- High-fidelity: High-fidelity prototypes are the ones that look and feel a lot like the actual product. These prototypes contain all the necessary visual elements like color, content, fonts, proper background, and even functional buttons. At times, the stakeholders might want to notch up the prototype by adding a bit of coding and more visual elements like animations for better interactions with the end-users.

Of course, the high-fidelity prototype is preferred over low-fidelity but the latter can be said as the precursor to the former. In fact, in rapid prototyping, low-fidelity prototypes are the first step toward high-fidelity as they help out to filter out the necessary features quickly.

The Rapid Prototype Development Process

Compared to traditional prototyping, rapid prototyping consists of lesser steps but is as effective as the traditional one. The steps described below are common to both low-fidelity and high-fidelity types but the time taken for the creation of a high-fidelity prototype is more than low-fidelity types. So let’s have a look.

1) The Ideation – As the name suggests, the ideation step formulates the concepts and gets the most basic queries solved like the need for the app, the features, its benefits, and ultimately its cross-verification with user requirements.

2) Tool Selection – This is the second step in the rapid prototyping process in which the designers choose the right tools to create their wireframes. The time and complexity of this step depend largely on the type of prototype being developed. In the case of a paper prototype, there is nothing much to choose from, but if it’s a high-fidelity one, then one needs to decide on the right tools to choose from. Thankfully, there are plenty of them available including Figma, Sketch and InVision.

3) The Sorting – In the sorting step, the stakeholders and the designers sort out the features and functions that are vital to the operation of the application. Both parties ensure that these features find maximum usage among the users and play a decisive role in the fate of the app.

4) The Creation – This is the fourth step in which the selected tools are put to use and the concepts are turned into reality. Based on the assessment of the ideation phase and the sorting phase, the designers and developers put the features and functions into place and finally create a prototype.

5) The Testing – Once the prototype is ready, the fifth step comes into place which is the testing of the prototype. It is circulated among stakeholders, and the end-users to find the flaws and gather real-time feedback.

6) The Iteration – The iteration step is the fine-tuning of the prototype based on the feedback of the users and the stakeholders. The designing and development team works and experiments with their creative process to come up with innovatively plausible solutions.

Summing Up

The entire process of converting an idea into a workable digital product is lengthy and messy. But this messy process can become a lot less chaotic and confounding with the help of mobile app prototyping services. However, you will definitely need to team up with the right people in order to get the most impressive prototypes with all the vital design and functional aspects covered and done in the right way.