Creating an interactive prototype to ‘try out’ key aspects of any digital solution can significantly reduce development costs and dramatically improve the effectiveness of the end result.
Read our guide to Mando Group’s prototyping service to answer the following questions:
What is prototyping?
You wouldn’t manufacture a consumer product without trying out simplified versions of it first – it’s critical to understand how it feels in your hand, how it operates, or whether the controls make sense and are easy to use. This iterative approach to design helps create better products, but in many cases digital solutions are launched without any of the same support, and the results speak for themselves.
Although prototypes can be as simple as hand drawn sketches, we find that interactive prototypes help give clients, designers, programmers and end-users an experience as close to the finished system as possible. That means better feedback, better understanding of how the system should ‘feel’ to use, and better communication of what it should do than a 100-page specification can ever bring.
Mando Group’s consultancy team can create prototypes for key aspects or processes (e.g. for a product “how much do I need?” quantity calculator), or full online applications (e.g. a customer account self-service system)
We have a flexible approach to prototyping that ensures you get the insight you need without spending more time or money than is necessary.
What will it give me?
Conducting prototyping will allow you to;
- ensure all stakeholders are on the same page
- clearly identify functional elements that are needed
- highlight potential interaction problems before costly and time consuming development work starts
- test users’ reactions to various elements at an early stage
How do you do it?
1. Identify the key processes / features
For smaller solutions or contained applications (e.g. a mobile app) it’s possible for a prototype to cover it entirely, but for others it may only be necessary to identify interactions that are critical for the success of the project. We would start by working with you to identify and agree all interactions to prototype and the best way to deliver this.
2. Collaborative sketching
At this stage with bring together perspectives from Business analysis, Information architecture, User experience design, and Graphic design to develop ideas around how a particular interaction might work best.
3. Create initial prototype
From this, we develop an initial prototype that shows how the user would flow through their interactions. In some cases the whole experience would be extremely simplified (lines, boxes & buttons etc…) but in others – especially where this is extending an existing solution – we might apply a rough prototype on top of existing design work to make the experience closer to a finished product.
4. Review & iterate
These prototypes are then reviewed by the internal team and the client to understand the user experience and look for sticking points and opportunities to ‘delight’ the user. In some cases it’s necessary to trade-off competing priorities to ensure the best overall result, and this also provides an opportunity to test the prototype with real users ahead of more expensive development.
5. Production handover
Once a prototype has been agreed it can feed into our normal design & development process. The tools we use allow us to not only generate interactive prototypes but also supporting specification documents to help in the development phase. Both can then be hosted as a reference point for later evaluation and comparison to the finished build.
Can you prove it?
Mando Group has extensive experience of delivering prototypes to help deliver client sign-off for large scale projects. For example, we’ve worked with United Utilities on the creation of their customer self-service system, and produced extensive interactive prototypes that covered the entire functionality for the portal with over 200 individual screens. This included tasks ranging from paying your bill and inputting your meter reading through to dealing with the complexity of a moving house process. Creating the interactive wireframes not only enabled key stakeholders from the business to agree functionality and logic flows for end users, but also provided a reference platform for usability testing and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for the actual production work.
What’s involved?
The scale of this can vary significantly depending on your project requirements. For further examples and to discuss what would be appropriate for your business please contact Jonathan.
