- Modern businesses use a variety of strategies
to bring great products to market quickly.
To do this, many of them leverage outside help
from design consultancies
and use near or offshore development.
Some use in-house strategies like remote production teams
and separate engineering groups.
So they'll often hand over to another team
the requirements that inform the design
along with detailed design documentation.
These are created in an effort to ensure success
by defining as much as they can
and writing an illustration before something is produced.
Unfortunately,
handing over design documents to another team,
even detailed designs like annotated wire frames
frequently fail to convey the idea in design intent.
Even when they produce what was intended,
they're committing several weeks,
if not months to developing it
and given that those ideas
and documentation are likely completely untested,
they may not provide an adequate solution
or fail all together.
Prototypes can convey the entire breadth of a design
including the concept, interaction model,
and design language.
Prototypes as documentation have the ability
to quickly convey the design's emotion and personality,
which fits well within the short cycles
or sprints commonly used by popular business methodologies
like agile and lean.
Let's explore some important things you'll want to keep
in mind when using prototypes in your design documentation
and when used as your main deliverable.
Plan your design cycle so that you
and your team are making prototypes together
and while you prototype to document,
you'll also use other approaches.
So when you need to generate ideas,
convey complexities or learn,
make sure that's all part of the plan.
Remember to include stakeholders in moments
that truly make them part of the design process.
Don't just have them approve designs,
rather find ways to make them part of the solution.
Then, as you invalidate designs,
they can help inform new ones.
Remember, they hold key insights
that often lead to successful solutions.
So giving prototypes the lead role
is valuable to modern businesses for three reasons.
First, they need design documents
that effectively convey the intent
of the design to other teams
and prototypes do that very well.
Second, prototyping can be be used
to rapidly frame a problem, learn,
and make something to test before committing much time
and money to a concept.
And third, made an intrinsic part of a design plan.
Prototypes can greatly increase stakeholder inclusion,
helping you make better design decisions together.