Why prototyping is an essential skill for product designers
The reasons why learning fast is so important for the product's success. And how prototyping can help with that.
Why?
Designers should first of all design. And prototyping is one of the most important skills for a UX specialist, Interface, or Product designer. The mistake of a designer or product manager in the early stages of development can negatively affect the product's success. Time and developer resources may be spent on a solution that does not address the problem correctly. To make a great product, a team should make as many iterations with real users as possible. We need to fail fast or, to say it better, learn fast. We need to learn extremely fast to succeed. Designers can help with that because making prototypes is cheap and fast.
When to use prototyping?
Here are some usage examples of prototyping:
Prototype for yourself. You will be able to see your designs in action. It can significantly improve the usability of a product if you are the only one testing.
Share the prototypes with your teammates. This can help you:
Sync on product decisions.
Get new ideas or improvement suggestions.
Understand the feasibility of the solution from a technical standpoint.
Save time on writing detailed documentation for development hand-off.
Test the designs with real users to validate a hypothesis.
Get the feature buy-ins from primary stakeholders through effective presentations.
Help you get funding from investors or a larger budget for your department.
What about fidelity?
Low-fidelity and paper prototypes.
Low-fidelity artifacts require abstract thinking. So use them to discuss general concepts and direction in the early stages. Choose people to show low-fidelity prototypes wisely. These can be other designers, product managers, or developers you can trust. Users or stakeholders usually expect polished designs, and you won’t get the needed results by showing them low-fidelity work.
Mid-fidelity prototypes and wireframes.
These are suitable to show to a broader team. Involve developers to ask about the feasibility of designs and critical flow mistakes. Stakeholders not involved in the development process would still expect clean UI. So to avoid getting comments about button placement or wrong colors, you must manage their expectations.
High-fidelity prototypes.
The higher the fidelity, the more helpful user feedback you’ll get. Ideally, this is what you should show to real users and primary stakeholders, as UI and small interactions are as important as general flow.
High-fidelity prototyping tips
Invest in the design system
To learn fast, you need to make high-fidelity prototypes fast. You need to invest in the design system and components library. The prototyping process becomes like building a lego set with everything prepared. You are not focusing on making the design look good; you focus on making the design solve the problem.
Advanced navigation
Don’t make one-directional prototypes. Nothing disturbs the simulation of real-life experience as the necessity to go to the start of a prototype:
If there are multiple paths to a goal in your designs, prototype them.
Don’t forget about the back actions.
If it’s a modal, it should open and close independently.
Navigation should be functional across all the screens, so users can go to any place in the flow as implied in a real product.
Lean high-fidelity prototype
If you don’t have enough time to invest in a high-fidelity prototype for more valid testing results, the prototype should ideally meet these criteria:
Use your company's color scheme.
Use the same fonts.
Use the same layouts.
Prototyping tools
I have tried a lot of prototyping tools. At some point, I even went hardcore with making vanilla HTML/CSS/JS prototypes. This is the list of my favorite ones.
Figma
Figma is the most powerful prototyping tool, in my opinion, because it is the most powerful UI design tool. Smart animate, overlays, and component variants features can do crazy things. Unfortunately, It lacks real inputs, variables, and conditions. But when they eventually add these, Figma will become the ultimate prototyping tool.
Axure
Axure is the best tool for prototyping complex interactions. Responsive UI capabilities and components were not perfect, at least in Axure 8. But conditions, variables, interaction events, support of javascript, data-driven tables, and widgets allow for making stunning production-like prototypes.
Protopie
Protopie has everything that Figma can’t do right now regarding prototyping.
Designers should first of all design. And making great prototypes will let you have a seat at the table because you will have a skill that can help your company learn faster. Of course, other complementary skills like research, quantitative analytics, usability testing, and coding are equally important. Designers who have expertise in the full product development cycle bring even more value to the team.