Design and Prototyping
What, why and when.
This is an essential phase for every project, new or existing ones.
Before designing for MVS (minimum viable service), a POC (proof of concept) should be validated.
Especially for new products and/or teams (stakeholders) with little or no digital experience.
The POC is usually a very rough form of the digital experience and the purpose of it is to help the stakeholders understand how the business idea/service will function.
This POC exercise can be also part of the discovery phase.
Who?
Designer Dev Team Stakeholders
How?
A user interface prototype is a hypothesis — a candidate design solution that you consider for a specific design problem. The most straightforward way to test this hypothesis is to watch users work with it.
There are many types of prototypes, ranging anywhere between any of these pairs of extremes:
Single page vs. multipage with enough menus, screens, and click targets that the user can completely finish a task
Realistic and detailed vs. hand-sketched on a piece of paper
Interactive (clickable) vs. static (requiring a person to manipulate different pages and act as a “computer”)
The choice of prototype will vary greatly depending on goals of the testing, completeness of the design, tools used to create the prototype, and resources available to help before and during the usability tests. But, whatever prototype you may use, testing it will help you learn about users’ interactions and reactions, so you can improve the design.
Methods and activities
Concept Walkthrough ›
Tomorrow’s Narrative ›
Prototypes ›
Role Playing ›
Service Image ›
User Scenarios ›
User Stories ›