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Prototypes
What is a prototype? Prototyping is a method of obtaining early feedback on our requirements. Looking at the requirements that our customers have given us, we’re actually building a small model, providing a model of that expected product before actually building the big product where all of the dollars are spent. It might be very expensive to build the actual product itself, but it might only just cost a tiny bit to build a model of that product so that we can get feedback on it and see what it’s actually like.
So why do we build a prototype, or why do we do prototyping?
It allows our stakeholders and the project team and the project customers who we’re delivering the business value to, to experiment with a model of that final product rather than being limited to just discussing those ideas. How many times have you sat in a meeting where you’ve got dozens of people and they’re all saying this and that – this way is the best, that way is the best. But now we’re actually just building a small model of those ideas so that we can see, feel and touch it. Now we can really understand whether it’s fit for purpose instead of just talking about it.
When it’s only talk, maybe someone who was just the loudest voice in the room might get their way instead of us actually seeing whether it’s fit for purpose or not.
In an agile environment or an iterative environment, prototypes also support that concept of progressive elaboration. We’re mocking up the item, we’re allowing our users to experiment with the item and then we’re getting that feedback. Ultimately that helps us refine the prototype. We’re putting that feedback back into the prototype instead of spending all that money on revising the final product itself.
There are a few examples that we can use for prototypes. We might build a small-scale product, we might do a computer-generated 2D or 3D model that we can see and move around and change. We might have floor plans or a model of a car or a house that we can see and actually walk through with computer-aided drawing for example.
We’ve got mock-ups of websites or the flow of something using storyboards, and ultimately we’ve also got simulations, potentially 3D simulations or even just experiences that we can talk through or walk through. One of the most common ones that you’ll see in a software environment is a storyboard. You can mock up a website in a small form and call it a Minimum Viable Product (you will see this term a lot) that’s from the Lean Startup and also an Agile terminology that you’ll see. We can storyboard that product which is a prototyping technique. It shows the sequence or navigation of our item through a series of images or illustrations. In software development storyboards use mock-ups of those screens to show the navigation paths through various web pages, screens or other interfaces. We can actually click on on this thing even though it’s just a picture, and then it will take us to the right place so we can understand the flow, how it will look on a very basic basis. But still it’ll give us an idea, and we can use that to adjust before spending all our money on the final product.
And that is the idea of Prototyping.
– David McLachlan