(2008-04-29) Cagan Highfidelity Prototypes

Martin Caganon High-Fidelity Prototypes. I’d like to highlight the top 10 major benefits of prototyping, and talk about some of the mechanics of building and using prototypes.

Benefits

1) First and foremost, a high-fidelity prototype gives you something realistic enough to try out your ideas with target users and customers before making a significant investment. (Solution Interview)

2) forces you – to think through your product to a much greater degree

3) collaboration between product manager, interaction designer, and architect/engineer

4) information necessary for accurate engineering cost estimates

5) provides the engineers and QA organization with a rich, interactive description of the product’s intended functionality

6) provides the rest of the organization – marketing, sales, customer service, business development, company execs – with a useful understanding of the product to come early enough

7) prevents the classic waterfall problem of doing design after the requirements

8) If you do a high-fidelity prototype and you test your ideas with users and you find significant problems, you will have saved your company the cost in terms of time and money of building something that would have failed

9) reduces the time it takes for your developers to build the product both because the product is better defined

10) helps keep the focus of the team on the user experience.

Notes

Prototyping tools have improved dramatically over the past several years...Balsamiq (hrm is that "high-fidelity"?)

you can usually use a much less skilled resource to create the prototype

Once the team moves from product discovery into implementation, the prototype should be version controlled and placed under change control. Any user visible changes to the product definition need to be approved by the product manager and engineering, and reflected in the prototype. The prototype serves as the key reference and master.

For product teams using Agile methods...It is much faster to try that idea out with a disposable prototype in days rather than wait months for one or more sprint cycles.... And there are typically too many critical things for the engineering team to do to use them for the product discovery process. By taking their time for this prototyping work they are not able to do what they should be doing—building production software.