Prototyping For Digital Product Design
Design the missing link of Product Development
I often compare Manufacturing industry with Software to explain ideas like testing strategy, Devops and CI/CD. And I feel there is one important concept that the wider software industry is yet to learn from Manufacturing. And it is that of Designing and prototyping.
A manufacturing startup would have not doubt about why it needs to create a prototype for its product that will be mass produced.
On the other hand, how many product startups actually realize why they need to prototype their idea to know what they are going to end up with.
Why manufacturing industry prototypes and does that reason apply to building digital products ?
Some of the reasons could be
- test and verify ideas
- solve problem that the product will face, before starting to build product
- to estimate the cost of product accurately
- to understand what their assembly pipelines will look like
- what kind of infrastructure they will need to build and deliver the end product
- what kind of expertise they need to hire
MVP is way more expensive than a throw away prototype.
MVP is a smaller investment than your full featured product. But it so only because you chose to build a smaller set of functionality first. To build a stable, scalable, extensible product your teams needs to spend time and effort in
- building a team,
- choosing suitable technology (frameworks, language)
- learning new technologies
- code reviews
- infrastructure of building, deploying and keeping things running
- team management, story creation, testing etc
- and you have to pay money for all of above.
Design is no science, its about trying out more things
You never know what works unless you try and test it.
Prototyping is all about making something work and make it as close as possible to the end vision for product.
Because you can build a prototype at much faster pace, run cheaply, you can try out much more than what you will ever be willing to experiment with real product with real customer.
A case study with prototyping
While working with and EdTech startup our founder had an idea of building a reading app. This was a hard problem to solve, not because of the tech but because its success was completely driven by the end user experience.
We spent lots of time trying to figure out what the end solution might look like, but there was no clarity on what the end user experience would look like and hence the development of content was uncertain too.
I came up with an idea of using videos to provide instruction and respond to user action. It seemed great in my mind, but noon on the team seemed to appreciate the idea. I was sure if others could see it in action, there perception would change.
So I built a simple data driven angularjs application that read data from JSON files and used it to drive a video based based experience, combined with interactions like text selection, polling, drag and drop.
To keep moving fast, I used Mac’s text to speech engine to create sound tracks and used a random anime from youtube to create instructional videos.Here the what the first prototype looked like :
Once the team saw it in action, there was a immediate consensus. All of a sudden we knew what the end product will look like. We spent next couple of months iterating, recording videos with real users, creating content based on interactions, creating standalone versions, feedback system and this is what we reached at :
Some of the benefits I found with prototype :
- Easily having multiple versions of product, with just a URL.
- Incredible pace of adding new features, deploying new versions, dramatic changes to existing features.
- Rather than extensive discussions and plans, we test out various approaches
