What is an Early Prototype UX Design?

What is an Early Prototype?

An early prototype is the preliminary version of a product or a system used to test ideas or functionalities. It is used in the early phases of the development process to quickly and cost-effectively explore design ideas and concepts. They are generally a basic design and do not incorporate detailed functionalities of the final product.

UX refers to the user’s interaction with a product or a system. It ensures that the users easily access the features offered by the product. A good UX design is based on the behavior and needs of users. Various factors like usability, accessibility, performance, and design aesthetics are considered while implementing the design.

Early Prototype UX Design

Key Stages of Prototyping

1. The first stage is collecting requirements for the project– gathering information about the client’s preferences about the product’s appearance and function. The requirements then have to be analyzed to create a roadmap for the development process.
2. The next step that has to be done is creating a quick, basic design of the product. The design could be further modified based on the client’s feedback.
3. This is followed by the creation of a small working model or a prototype of the product as per the needs of the client. This working model would be a miniature version of the actual product.
4. Subsequently, this prototype is presented to the clients. The clients then express their opinion on the prototype, whether it needs any modifications or is up to the mark. The necessary amendments are then made to the prototype. This step is iterated until the clients are content with the model and approve of the design.
5. Once that is done, the final product is made based on the approved prototype. The product now has to be tested thoroughly and finally deployed.

Benefits of Prototype Usability Testing

1. Identification of Design Flaws: Prototype testing helps in identifying errors in the design, way before the initialization of the development process. This saves a lot of time and money since modifications in a later change of development are generally expensive and time consuming.
2. Improve UX(User Experience): Prototype testing helps ensure that the requirements of users are fulfilled.
3. Reduce development cost: testing the prototype not only saves the cost by identifying errors at an early stage but also helps prioritize features and reduce building cost of unnecessary features, not required by the user.
4. Gather user feedback: It provides an opportunity to gather user feedback and insights. This can enhance the development process by keeping scope for improvement.

Why is It Important to Test Early?

If errors are noticed in a product after its complete development, it becomes highly difficult to make modifications to it. It is also not very cost friendly and might be a lengthy procedure also. Hence, testing a product early is very crucial to avoid all such problems. Consider a situation, where a residential building is being built. It has already been built and the flats are ready for sale. Suddenly a customer asks them if LPG Pipeline is available in the kitchen or not. Now imagine how difficult it would be to dig through the walls and the floors again to get the pipeline. Although it is possible to get a pipeline, the amount of money and time needed for it would be huge.

Types of UX Prototypes and what an Early Prototype involves

• Low-Fidelity Prototypes
• Wireframes
• Interactive Prototypes
• High-Fidelity Prototypes
• Functional Prototypes
• Digital Prototyping Tools

Prototyping can take up several forms, however talking about an early prototype UX design, it involves mainly Low-Fidelity prototypes and wireframes only.

Since they are needed at a very early stage of product development, Low Fidelity prototypes focus more on the basic design and interactions, rather than the minute details or functionalities.

Wireframes are low-fidelity and focus on the placements of elements on the screen, such as buttons and navigation menus. They do not incorporate details like colors or sizes of elements. They are used to portray the layout and functionality of a design to team members and stakeholders and help in identifying the issues in the user flow at a very early stage. Wireframing can be done on paper with hand-drawn sketches or with digital tools such as wireframing software.

Challenges in Prototyping

1. Unclear Objectives: If the objective is not well defined, efforts can become more diverse and not focused, leading to the prototype being inefficient in demonstrating the core goal of the product.
2. Resource Constraints: Lack of skilled designers, prototyping tools, and user facilities, which are a pre-requisite for prototyping may cause hindrance in the process.
3. Time Constraints: In projects where deadlines are tight, time could be a constraint. Since prototyping, then making modifications to the prototype as per the feedback of the clients and getting the approval again until they are satisfied takes time.
4. Stakeholder Buy-In: Some stakeholders consider prototyping wastage of time. They may want to get the product to market quickly and hence it is necessary to elucidate to them the importance of prototyping at an early stage.
5. Technical Constraints: Prototyping tools available may not be enough to portray the goal of the product clearly. This leads to misinterpretations regarding the product in the minds of the stakeholders.
6. Scope Creep: Since prototypes evolve on user feedback, there is a possibility of scope creep, where the prototype expands to incorporate various features, leading to diversion from the core goal.

Emerging Trends in Prototyping

1. Remote and Collaborative Prototyping: Features like real-time editing, commenting, and version control are becoming the new standard in prototyping. This would enable collaboration across distributed teams.
2. AI-powered prototyping: AI algorithms are being used in various aspects of prototyping such as predicting user behavior, generating designs and analyzing user feedback.
3. Cross-platform Prototyping: Since there is no stop to counting the number of prototyping platforms available, there is a need for prototyping tools that support cross-platform design. Such designer friendly tools are already gaining popularity.
4. Augmented and Virtual Reality Prototyping: With a rise in the use of AR and VR technologies, even designers can now use them to create immersive prototypes and test user interactions in AR and VR environments.

Conclusion

Prototype is a visual representation of the final product. It is a tool used to demonstrate ideas and concepts to stakeholders or clients effectively. It not only helps in communicating the ideas but has a lot more advantages. Prototyping at an early stage helps a lot in reduction of development time and cost. There are several types and techniques of prototyping, but an early UX prototyping involves only low-fidelity prototypes and wireframes. There could be challenges in the process of making a prototype, however they can be avoided with the guidance of experienced and skilled designers. To make a project successful, prototyping must be the first step. It is used everywhere-in healthcare, transportation, consumer goods, manufacturing, construction, software design, electronics and various other fields. With advancements in technologies, prototyping is also being evolved to make the process easier, and to provide better outputs.