How Teams can Benefit from Prototype Testing?
By: Rapidfork Technology
Tags: Feedback, Prototyping, Prototype Testing, Prototyping Techniques

Prototyping is the first step to success. We cannot stress the importance and benefit of prototyping, especially for small teams enough. Prototyping is essential to help your team create the best product possible. It’s a chance to experiment with ideas and turn them into something tangible that you can test and build upon. When you fail with your prototype, you land softly — there’s always the chance to iterate and improve. Prototypes are the first draft of the final product. Frankly, not prototyping and testing is like shooting yourself in the foot, especially if you are a small team.

The prototype gives the customer a complete idea of ​​how the final product will look like. Prototyping allows you to streamline the design development process, focusing on important interface elements.

At the prototyping stage, it is possible to identify unnecessary elements that are best abandoned. This process significantly reduces the workload of the designer in developing the project and thus saves the customer money. Having a prototype in hand, the designer and customer more clearly represent the result. It makes it easier to understand the tasks for each team member. It gives them the opportunity to do more realistic planning of development deadlines and more accurately determine the cost of work, which is hugely beneficial to small teams.

So, Why Make and Test a Prototype?

Creating a prototype is one step that precedes the launch of the final product. In fact, prototyping your future product or service has several advantages.

Test Technical Feasibility

Prototyping makes it possible to visualize an idea and understand which aspects of the idea prove difficult or impossible to implement. Making a prototype can thus highlight unanticipated physical, technical, or financial constraints and so save a lot of time for your team.

2. Present Your Idea to The Customers more clearly

Having a prototype makes it possible to present your future offer to potential customers concretely. In doing so, you have a considerable asset before the final launch of your offer. You have collected the opinions, testimonials, and recommendations of your potential customers. Having a prototype could also allow you to better prepare your marketing-communication actions and start your pre-sales.

3. Risk Reduction

The risks of the project failure with the completed prototyping stage are significantly lower than the projects in which prototyping was not carried out.

Simply because prototypes directly affect the most important components of the project: resources, time, and budget. After carrying out prototyping, most of the hidden shortcomings are exposed & we find functional gaps. Therefore, it’s possible to understand and estimate the number of necessary resources and development time, which is an enormous benefit for smaller teams. Suppose a feature that seemed hot in theory, when implemented, is giving you and customers cringe. It is great to find it while prototyping rather than once the product implementation begins.

4. Simulate The Actual Product

The most important advantage of a prototype is that it simulates the real and future product. It can help attract customers to invest in the product before allocating any resources needed for implementation. You can test the design’s correctness before it comes into production and you can discover design errors. Also, a prototype made available to a sample of users helps to find out in advance how their product interacts with the product and meets their expectations.

5. Provide Focused Feedback

Each person has his own vision of the product to be implemented and, in principle, wants this vision to be found in the final product. Exposure to the prototype helps to unify all ideas and enables the beneficiaries to see the product from a fresh perspective. It helps them to see it materialized and to provide more focused feedback on the desired details.

Feedback is essential to discover the needs and expectations of users, business requirements, and a clear idea of where the product is heading.

6. Planning

The teams that implement the design get essential information that helps them plan what they need to implement. A prototype can be considered, most often the project specification, and helps the entire team to create user stories and focus on user needs. If this is done in time, before a Sprint starts, it will only bring benefits to the team.

7. Quick and Easy to Create

Even a product beneficiary can help develop a prototype. It is essential to provide a simple idea on paper so that the designer understands the functionality and logic of the product. An experienced designer into a ready-to-implement product will transform this simple sketch, illustration with a few buttons for a website.

Here’s how you carry out prototype testing:

Imagine you need to create an app. It should contain all the information about services, prices, features, and advantages.

The best way to do Prototype Testing is a highly detailed (Hi-Fi) click dummy, a click dummy simulates user interactions by connecting mockups with each other. Here the user can click through the dummy and tell the mobile provider if the concept makes sense. The click dummy should contain the homepage of the app, some category pages (for example “about, search”), and some service pages (for example “explore, list, or Your Cart if it’s an e-shopping app”). The testers should get upfront instructions through the use cases. That means they get a task like “buy a sweater you like or wishlist a movie of your liking if it’s a streaming service app”, but they are not told how to do it. Then they try to reach the goal and answer some questions about their experience: Was the navigation intuitive? Did you like the design? What feature was missing? Did you like the menu? This feedback of your target group can be precious before investing. This gives you an insight into what the product will look like. Such things are tremendous advantages for smaller teams- it saves time and gives you clear and direct goals/features to work on.

So, to conclude, we can safely assume that prototyping is a clear advantage for your team and the customer, it’s massively useful to both parties. Teams that have a few members and are restricted by budget and resources (or even big-budget) benefit immensely and take their development process to the next level.