, former UX Designer at Microsoft, to discuss all things high-fidelity prototyping. In this article, we’re going to delve into how he approaches high-fidelity prototyping—specifically, the three principles that he follows on a daily basis.

 is the process of creating prototypes that look and feel realistic, are highly functional and interactive, and are barely distinguishable from the end product. You’d typically create high-fidelity prototypes with a prototyping tool like 

Use high-fidelity prototypes for the following:

The main advantage of high-fidelity prototyping is discovering mistakes or improvements before moving into costly development and implementation.

1. Remember: you’re not building a real product 

) are so advanced that designers can almost get caught up in everything that they can do. It’s easy to lose yourself in a project and to feel like you’re creating an actual product.

The thing is, as soon as you're in that mindset, you start wanting to make everything work. You want to make it flexible, modular, and reusable—even though this is totally unnecessary. Prototypes aren’t the end product, they just help you to receive crucial feedback and iterate more effectively. I personally believe you should create prototypes as quickly as possible while still making sure they function and look the way that they should.

Try not to spend time perfecting the visual look. Just make them good enough to be believable. At the beginning of the design process, in most cases, your job is to create ten or so prototypes, test them all, and get rid of eight or nine of them before proceeding. If you’re spending multiple days just to produce a single component, your development timeline is going to take a lot more time than you planned.

2. Work on interaction design before UI design 

I always suggest that designers design first in a prototyping tool rather than in a static UI creation tool. Many designers are accustomed to using 

, and so on—in other words, tools based focusing on UI design primarily rather than interaction design. The problem here is that it’s easy to miss key interactions and scenarios that need to be designed for.

Think about the gaming industry. They spend a a lot of time on 

, trying to work out how everything will interact from an interaction perspective before they layer on final graphics. Unfortunately, in the digital product design world, too many professionals do this the other way around. The main thing is to ensure that the product works as expected—the high-fidelity visual design can come later.

I’ve seen this mistake happen in quite a few different companies. Product and UI designers will immediately start creating a high-fidelity UI in Sketch (or whichever tool they’re using). Meanwhile, the UX practitioner will head off and conduct some user research to test fundamental ideas using basic wireframes. When it comes to the actual prototyping process, it becomes a struggle to fit the product’s functionality into the static UI that has already been created.

This is why interaction design is so important. Interaction designers need to stitch together the UX and UI, focusing primarily on how the product will work before layering in the visual design elements.

3. Don’t get too emotionally attached  

I sometimes see designers, especially those at the beginning of their careers, becoming dejected when their prototype is torn apart (figuratively, not literally!) by test participants during the usability testing process. They’ve worked so hard on producing the initial prototype, creating beautiful animations—only to witness that users ignore them and that slick motion design doesn’t fix bad UX design.

This comes back to the previous point. If you focus too heavily on the UI design and neglect key usability factors, it doesn’t matter how nice it looks—the prototype won’t receive great feedback.

So it’s important for designers to not get too emotionally attached to any high-fidelity prototypes they create. Remember that it’s just a prototype! Its sole purpose is to help you gather the insights you need to make sure that your product itself is a success.

 is a key step in the product design journey, but it’s not the final destination. Create prototypes with the expectation that users will tell you just how bad they are. Welcome this “negative” feedback. After all, it takes you one step closer to creating a brilliant product.

Thanks for your great insights, Darren—we hope that you can apply his principles to your own prototyping. If you’d like to hear more about how Darren approaches high-fidelity prototyping, and to learn his key tips and tricks for getting the most out of 

Apply Darren his 3 key principles right away by creating your first high-fidelity prototypes with ProtoPie.

Discover 3 high-fidelity prototyping principles a UX Designer at Microsoft follows everyday.

3 High-Fidelity Prototyping Principles Designers Need to Know

, we’re proud that some of the design industry’s leading figures use (and love) our products. Figures like 

Darren has been a designer for about 32 years, starting out in graphic and brand design before the emergence—and widespread adoption—of the internet. He then forayed into 

 enterprise applications, until the iPhone came out in 2007 when his focus turned to mobile.

He worked in mobile for around 12 years before transitioning into multi-device design. Now, he’s currently working at Microsoft on the Windows & Devices team, collaborating with multiple teams of designers that design everything inside of Microsoft.

 is so important and how designers should approach building their very prototyping stack.

Everyone, including designers, is inherently biased. We’re controlled by our brains—so we design according to how we think as individuals. But you can’t produce products for the masses if you only ever take your own perspective into account. That’s where testing comes in.

You need to test your designs on everybody: people of different ages, people from different cultures, people with disabilities, and so on. Once you start to see how all these different people use your design, you can begin to draw some insights about what needs to be improved or changed.

There will always be things that you thought might work but didn’t. Or, there might be some key elements that you've missed. That’s why it’s so important to test your designs with prototypes. Don’t assume that you know everything—a good designer is a humble designer.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can't just rely on static design tools—they’re just tools to create graphics. They’re ultimately better versions of Photoshop and as great as they are at drawing vectors, buttons, and so on, they’re not a replacement for proper interaction design. They don't have the capabilities to get you close enough to the real thing.

Some tools do have low-fidelity prototyping capabilities. While low-fidelity testing certainly has its benefits, you still always need to conduct high-fidelity testing too. If you jump ahead and go straight from wireframes to building a product, you're almost certain to miss critical design use cases—and it would be even more expensive (and time-consuming) to make the necessary adjustments later on. 

With so many tools out there, do designers need to learn them all?

First and foremost, no—you definitely don't need to learn all the tools out there to do your job. I’m a bit geeky and love testing out new tools, but that’s because it’s my passion, not a necessity for my day job.

Ultimately, it all comes down to needs. Which tools do you need to do do the job right? It’s not a case of the more the merrier. If you’re constantly going from one tool to the next, not only are you costing your company a lot of money in license fees, without gaining enough expertise in any one tool to derive maximum value from using it.

I don’t think there’s ever going to be a one-tool-to-rule-them-all type of scenario. And even when there are tools that do a lot of great things, from my experience, this can actually be too overwhelming. I remember using 

 when I was trying to learn 3D—like most 3D tools, it actually had about 4 apps inside of it. There was one for 2D path creation, a lofting tool, a modeling tool, and a shading tool.

When I realized that this one app contained so many different elements that I needed to learn, it made me a feel bit overwhelmed. If they had been separate apps, I think I would’ve found it easier to take the process one step at a time. 

How do you approach building out your design stack?

Designers need a complementary design stack that helps them with each element of the design process: producing wireframes, UI design, high-fidelity prototyping, and so on. The first step is to map out every single stage of your design process, the timeline from taking an idea and building a tangible product or feature. Then, you can begin to find the ideal tool for each stage.

If you introduce a tool but you find that it keeps on getting in your way (for whatever reason), then it’s probably not the right tool for you. The ideal scenario you’re looking for is to reduce as much friction as possible from the design process. The tools that you use should fit within your process, not the other way round. If you find this is the case, then look for an alternative. Want to find out more tips and tricks from Darren?

If you’re new to high-fidelity prototyping, or you just want to improve your own approach, then you should check out Darren’s great educational content. His training will teach you everything you need to know about how to use 

, all the way from the basics to whatever you need to becoming an advanced prototyping wizard.

That’s right—you’ll be getting key insights, tips, and tricks from a former Microsoft UX Designer. What more could you ask for?

 is the easiest interactive prototyping tool for all digital products. Designers can turn their UI/UX design ideas into high-fidelity prototypes for mobile, desktop, web, all the way to IoT. They can explore, validate, and test design solutions and ideas by creating very realistic, production-like prototypes without code and the help of engineers.

Is prototyping really that important? Darren Bennett, UX Designer at Microsoft, answers this question and sheds light on building the right design stack for prototyping.

The Importance of Prototyping and Your Design Stack

Here's the thing: the way we build products is broken. Let me explain that.

For the past twenty years or so, the startup world has moved from waterfall to agile development processes. Smaller deliverables replaced long projects as product teams transitioned to an incremental approach to delivering software.

With the rise of agile development practices and 

, more and more companies started adopting an iterative design and product-building mindset, releasing and learning from users more often.

However, that shift has happened incrementally and we’re still not learning as fast as we could be. We got better and quicker at shipping and learning after launch, but we still hadn't found a viable way to learn from users 

Only the companies that afford the cost of research and see the value in bringing dedicated researchers onboard benefit from insights and access to users at scale. Even so, the 

typical ratio of researcher-to-designer-to-developer

Most product teams rely on releasing and learning after development, which ultimately leads to product and design teams doing avoidable rework. It’s been 

 that the cost of fixing errors after launch can be as much as a hundred times higher than fixing them during the development stage.

, a rapid testing platform for product teams, I've been at the forefront of this challenge, making it our mission to enable anyone to test and learn rapidly during the design and product build cycle. We've purposely built a platform that allows anyone from designers to marketers to test any experience as part of their workflow to learn what works and what doesn't and make informed decisions faster.

Why continuous testing changes the way you design and build

For product and design teams, testing and learning are key steps to building great user experiences. When you test your work early in the process, you avoid spending huge amounts of time and resources on developing the wrong ideas and redoing your work later.

Moreover, when testing occurs cross-departmentally and everyone from PMs and designers to UXRs test their piece of the puzzle, the result is a validated process from beginning to end. Product managers only add ideas that have been researched and validated to the product roadmap, designers hand off thoroughly tested mockups, and marketers launch validated campaigns.

"The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization's learning culture." - Josh Bersin, President Bersin by Deloitte

Finally, the more you test and learn from users, the more you and your team acquire knowledge about what works and what doesn't. This institutional know-how about your users and the problem space is a key driver of your organization's success. And when that happens inside each department across the entire organization—that’s one of the biggest competitive advantages your company can have.

How to test early and often with the Rapid Testing Framework

Now that we looked at the importance and benefits of testing let's see how you and your product and design teams can implement it in your organization.

 that helps you run testing at every stage of the process from idea to launch. But first, let's define what we mean by rapid testing. Rapid testing is a decision-making framework in which every design and product decision is made with user input.

This framework approaches every decision as a testable input—concepts, designs, copy, wireframes—all of these are tested and validated with users during the product build cycle.

IOTA Loops support the Rapid Testing Framework at key stages of the process, from idea and concept validation to prototype and copy testing. The IOTA acronym stands for Input, Objective, Test, and Analysis. Let’s look at these stages in detail. 

In every IOTA loop, the testing process starts by defining an input—a testable hypothesis or question. Examples of inputs:

Is the product feature we want to develop going to bring value to our users?

What design concept should we move forward with?

It’s important to define the right input from the outset, as this will define your decision. Take your time understanding the problem and what it is you need to test with users.

Next, set your Objective. The objective(s) is the result you’ll measure success by. Each test should have clear objectives, so you can easily determine whether your test has succeeded or not. In the case of the latter, you’ll need to refine and iterate on the solution until the objective is reached.

For example, if you’re testing a high-fidelity prototype at the latest stages of the design process, a good objective can be:

“We want more than 80% of test users to complete the tasks successfully.”

“Our goal is for 85% of test participants to associate the new messaging with ___.”

Establishing clear objectives and goals at the start of the process is a core component of testing rapidly—when you know your goal, you know what to look for.

Next, create your Test. This includes defining the right testing methodology from 5-second testing to prototype testing and more—the method you need depends on the input and objective you defined above.

At this stage, you can also create a test plan and define the questions you’ll ask users, the tasks, or any other details that you’ll need to take into account. Running the test becomes easier when you’ve planned, so make sure you prepare for it accordingly.

 part includes assessing your results to determine the next steps. If the test results meet the objective set, then you and your team can make the decision and the next phase of the design process begins. If not, iterate on the solution until the results are met.

Making testing part of your design process

Making rapid testing a part of your design workflow will take some practice, but the most important thing is to get started somewhere. Like anything else, testing and research is a muscle that needs to be trained and built over time. Here are a few tips on testing during the design process:

Most of the time, designers are reluctant to put their work out there. But, from sharing your work with colleagues to ask for feedback or running user testing—being vulnerable is a part of becoming a great designer. In fact, sharing what you’ve built with users or anyone else is a key step to becoming better at your job. You’ll get feedback on how you can improve your designs from the people who’ll use what you’re building—your users. And sometimes, getting an outside perspective on your work can help you find a new solution or approach the problem from a different angle. Embracing vulnerability is a central part of the design process and can only make you better at your job.

Another mistake most designers make is waiting until they have a high-fidelity prototype to share with users. That’s related to the above point, as sharing work in progress is about being vulnerable. 

But, testing at the earliest stages of the design process is critical, especially when you’re working based on assumptions on a new product or feature. Helen Tsvirinkal, Product Designer at Shopify, 

 about the importance of early, formative testing: 

“If a project is fixing a well-known problem, maybe testing early is less necessary. But if you’re working off assumptions, you need to test low-fidelity designs as soon as possible to find out what a user expects.”

You can start researching and testing before the design process even begins. From problem exploration and generative user interviews to idea and concept validation—start testing your key design decisions early in the process to avoid significant reworks down the line.

Building a testing muscle inside your organization won’t happen overnight. But you can build on it gradually if everyone is on the same page about the benefits of testing.

One way to showcase the value you and your team can get from testing more often is by sharing the findings publicly. Behzod Sirjani, former Head of Research & Analytics Operations at Slack and founder of Yet Another Studio, 

“I’ve seen the most success with usability testing when designers, engineers, and product managers are involved in understanding how people actually use or don’t use a product. You want people who have the ability to make decisions to be involved, so you can make sure that all of your research is building a case for the important decisions that you want to make, whether that’s as high level as “do we release this product?” or as focused as “Is this a more usable menu?” - Behzod Sirjani

There are multiple ways to get people more involved in the process, including:

Document your findings in a report and highlight key learnings

Do a Loom video and run over the main findings

Invite people to participate in interviews or debriefs

Do a hands-on product team meeting to discuss results and next steps

For instance, the team at BlaBlaCar has a Slack channel for ongoing user interviews that everyone in the company can join and see feedback in real-time. Making testing part of your process is all about building awareness about the value user feedback provides and that starts by sharing any insights or learnings with your team.

Ultimately, the more testing you do and the more you communicate its importance and value, the easier it will be to 

ProtoPie helps designers bring their ideas to life in the form of high-fidelity interactive prototypes. Turn those design ideas into clarity, insights, and business gains. To learn more about how ProtoPie can help you get from concept to creation, explore the website or try it for free! 

If you want to see Maze integrating with ProtoPie, 

Jonathan Widawski, CEO at Maze, explains how The Rapid Testing Framework allows you to test rapidly at every stage of the product development process.

How to Test Early and Often During the Entire Product Development Process

Great design doesn’t operate in isolation.

Everything in life is connected to one system or another. Cities are part of countries, countries form continents, and continents make up the earth. Individuals are part of families, families of civilizations, and civilizations make up the entire human race.

It’s easy to focus on what’s in front of us in life, and this is especially true when designing a new product. Creating innovative solutions requires taking a granular, detailed view. You must consider every detail of what your product can do—and how it can help users.

But to create truly life-changing solutions, you must remember one thing at all times: everything is part of a larger system. This approach is known as systems thinking.

Let’s explore what systems thinking is, why designers must pay such close attention to it, the differences between design thinking and systems thinking, and how designers can learn systems thinking with ProtoPie.

Systems thinking is the ability to view systems from a broad perspective—seeing overall structures, patterns, and cycles.

, systems scientist, lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning, puts it: “Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots.”

Systems thinking is a lens through which to consider life—and to better solve problems. It encourages us to broaden our thinking, taking into account larger problems, causes, and impacts. In other words, it promotes viewing everything as part of a wider system.

The best designers make a habit out of zooming out from time to time, adopting a wide-angle lens when analyzing consumer behavior and habits. They consider how their product will impact various touchpoints throughout users’ lives—and seek to design products that have as wide, and positive, an impact as possible.

In other words, they adopt a systems thinking approach.

There are two main steps that designers should follow when doing this:

They should understand how their products fit into a collective system (aka, their users’ lives);

If they do, they can design products that enable users to effectively flow throughout this entire ecosystem.

The inter-relationships between design elements.

A user-centered perspective, understanding how, when, where, and why the user interacts with their design.

Address the user group as part of an all-encompassing ecosystem.

Designers usually follow a user-centered approach. They identify users’ real-world behaviors (and problems) to create products that will add value to their lives. Paying such close attention to users has a ton of benefits—for example, it ensures that every single element of a product is well thought-out and well-executed.

In design thinking, the approach is generally as follows:

 with users, stepping into their shoes to understand the challenges they face. They 

) potential solutions. These solutions are built into 

Systems thinking, on the other hand, is still user-centered—but it takes a more holistic approach when considering user behavior. It requires designers to zoom in and out of various aspects of users’ lives, recognizing dependencies between different parts of the overall system.

We’re not saying that designers must ditch design thinking. Instead, they should swap between the two approaches to gain the best results. This will help them create products that are as impactful, and valuable, as possible.

Imagine you’re designing a chair for people with degenerative diseases. When adopting a design-centered approach, you might focus on how comfortable it is. Perhaps you’ll create custom tactile controls so that the user can easily adjust how much it reclines, and so on. But then you zoom out and consider some other problems that sufferers of degenerative diseases face on a daily basis.

You realize they may struggle to call for help—so you add an easily accessible ‘Help’ or ‘Panic’ button. Better still, you include voice activation technology and integrate the chair with their phone’s operating system. This allows them to answer, and make, calls without even needing to lift a finger.

But what happens if you zoom out even further?

You might realize that you can further help users by connecting the chair to their home’s thermostat, or to the front door—if somebody rings the bell then the user can communicate with them from the comfort of their chair.

Perhaps you go one step further still, integrating their chair with their local hospital or health care authority’s IT systems. You ensure that users can easily communicate with healthcare officials, book home visits, order medication, and so on—all via the chair. Maybe you could even have the chair test ongoing health metrics, such as heart rate variability, and link this up to medical professionals’ records.

This one example just goes to show the value of systems thinking. By recognizing that no product works in isolation—and that everything is part of a larger system—you can create powerful products that touch every aspect of users’ lives.

As you might’ve guessed, we’re massive fans of systems thinking here at ProtoPie. We’re also massive fans of education. We believe that anybody can become a great designer, provided they learn the key elements—such as systems thinking.

That’s why we created our Class Support Program (CSP). This allows educators (schools, colleges, and universities) to use ProtoPie for free. But in true systems thinking fashion, we didn’t just want to know that schools were using ProtoPie—we also 

 how and why, and to connect it to their larger mission.

So we decided to speak to professors that regularly use ProtoPie. When we listened to them, they told us that they ultimately wanted their students to gain a detailed understanding (and appreciation) of systems thinking and logical thinking.

ProtoPie is a tool in teaching them the interplay between design and systems thinking. It allowed students to begin connecting individual motions and interactions to realistic end-user workflows. Then, they could start to connect these workflows to larger problems, user behaviors, and systems.

When designing anything, students must first ask: “Who are we designing for?” This then opens up a series of follow-up questions: “How do these people behave?”, “What problems are they facing?”, and “How can we help?”.

Students would use ProtoPie to build up their own projects throughout the course. But in the process of creating their project, they’d be encouraged to think about the larger problems that they were trying to solve—and would have to adopt a systems thinking approach.

Would you like to teach your students the value of systems thinking? Would you like to give them a tool that allows them to seamlessly move between design thinking to systems thinking, from individual interactions to how their prototypes will impact bigger issues?

. You’ll receive a 1-year-long license for free which can then be extended for as long as you’re using the tool for educational purposes.

The best products touch every aspect of users’ lives. This requires following an approach known as systems thinking. 

Systems Thinking for Designers 101

Not all prototypes are created equal. Take lo-fi versus hi-f prototypes, for example. While they’re both useful in their own ways, that doesn’t mean to say that they look or feel the same—or that they’re both equally valuable throughout all stages of the product development process.

This post will explore the concept of fidelity, outlining the main differences between lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes before examining when to use each type.

In prototyping, the term “fidelity” refers to how close a representation is to the intended end-product. It also refers to the level of detail and functionality you include in your prototype. The main categories of fidelity are low-fidelity (lo-fi) and high-fidelity (hi-fi).

Low-fidelity prototyping is a quick, simple way of evolving an initial idea or concept into a somewhat more tangible representation of what your final product might look like. The goal of a low-fidelity prototype is simply to outline the flow and to check the usefulness and usability of your proposed functionality. Lo-fi prototypes can either be made digitally or on paper. Examples include:

The key benefits of low-fidelity prototypes are that they are fast, easy, and affordable to create. It’s easy to make changes and test new iterations, anyone can produce them, and they encourage design thinking since the prototypes are clearly not finalized.

The downsides of low-fidelity prototypes are that they have limited interactivity, lack realism, are hard to use for user feedback, are sometimes too basic to reflect the user experience of the finished product, and can oversimplify complex issues. Most crucially, they require users to simply make their own assumptions when imagining how they would use the product (and what this experience will feel like.)

You want to quickly learn the scale of your project;

You want to test the idea first before you start development;

You keep the idea within the product team.

Let’s briefly examine the two main types of lo-fi prototypes: paper and click-through.

Paper prototypes might be the easiest, simplest way to create a lo-fi prototype—but that doesn’t mean to say that they aren’t valuable. Paper prototypes are great for fleshing out concepts while they’re still in their infancy. You can quickly scribble down a few sketches, see how they look, and get feedback. If something needs to be changed, you can literally go back to the drawing board.

Paper prototypes are quick to create, inexpensive, and some designers might even feel more creative when using a pencil and paper. They’re also pretty rough and ready—meaning you can generally elicit more honest feedback from people who might otherwise feel hesitant about criticizing a fully-formed digital prototype.

That said, paper prototypes aren’t suitable for the later stages of development. You can’t accurately recreate the digital experience on paper—so it certainly has its limitations. Plus, for many design teams, paper prototypes might just feel slightly unnecessary. If you’re going to be creating a digital prototype anyway, why even bother creating a paper version?

Click-through prototypes take paper prototypes to the next level, allowing users to test out the user flow in greater detail. In short, click-through prototyping tools let you upload photographs of paper prototypes—or to digitally recreate them using interactive software widgets—into a UX design application.

For each screen that the user sees, you can then create multiple hotspots that will redirect them to other screens. Imagine your first screen is a log-in page but you want to demonstrate what happens once a user logs in. By clicking on the ‘log in now’ button, the click-through prototype will take you to the next logical step/screen that the user would see.

Of course, click-through prototypes are still a long way off the final product. However, they do make up for one of the major drawbacks of paper prototyping: not being able to experience the user flow. They are therefore another useful lo-fi prototyping model that can be used in the early stages of product design.

If you want to try making your own click-through prototypes, check out tools like 

High-fidelity prototypes are more advanced, with their aesthetics and functions far closer to that of the final product. You’ll typically create high-fidelity prototypes further along in the process once a team has a firm grasp of what they want the finished product to embody, using a tool like 

 to help you bring your vision to life. High-fidelity prototypes are generally used for usability testing with real users or to get final design approval from stakeholders. Examples of high-fidelity prototypes include

The key benefits of high-fidelity prototypes are that they provide greater insight into what the end-product will look like, are instrumental in testing and validating individual design decisions, and are great to get buy-in from clients and stakeholders.

The downsides of high-fidelity prototypes are that these take longer to create, are costlier, and users may mistake the prototype for the finished product and form biases.

You want to start development before you decide on the “final” design;

You have a lo-fi that is tested and acceptable;

You want to take your lo-fi prototype to the next level;

You want to pitch the idea to a non-technical audience.

Let’s now dive explore digital and coded prototypes in further detail.

If you’re creating a digital product/experience then you’re eventually going to have to create a digital prototype—there are no two ways about it. That’s where digital prototyping software (such as 

) comes in. It allows designers to recreate the end product in detail, producing aesthetically pleasing, interactive prototypes that are close representations of the final user interface.

Designers can demonstrate what their experience will look like and how it will feel, which provides product teams with invaluable feedback before they go ahead and launch their final product. However, they also take a fair amount of time and energy to create—so for that reason, many product teams prefer quicker and easier alternatives (such as paper prototyping) earlier on throughout the design process

Coded prototypes are the closest version to the final product that designers will produce, both in terms of how they look and how they behave. This means that they’re great if you want to gather any last user feedback before you bring a product to market.

But not everybody can produce coded prototypes. To do so, you first need to code—which means that many designers are simply unable to create these hi-fi, complex prototypes without asking for help.

Making a hi-fi prototype isn’t as hard as you might think. In fact, these days, you don’t even need to know how to code.

 is a no-code digital prototyping tool that makes digital prototyping as intuitive as possible. It integrates with a variety of other design tools, including Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch, allowing you to easily import all existing designs in just a few clicks. Our seamless design workflow and unique conceptual model, leveraging a vast array of variables and formulas to provide endless possibilities, mean that anybody can create beautiful prototypes—no matter their level of skill or experience.

Hi-fi prototypes with a low barrier to entry. Ready to get started? 

Explore the concept of fidelity, the main differences between lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes before examining when to use each type. 

The Differences Between Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity Prototyping

Have you ever considered how some of the most innovative, revolutionary products were made? Whether it’s the telephone, the helicopter, or the computer, they all started out exactly the same: as an idea in someone’s mind.

But ideas alone matter for little. Turning your idea into a fully-fledged product can be a complex process marked by plenty of trial and error. However, there’s one key step that all ideas must go through if they are to become successful end-products: prototyping.

This post will explain why prototyping is such a crucial concept. Specifically, it will examine the following questions:

Ideas are imperfect concepts. You don’t know that your idea definitely works, or if it will work as you think it will. That’s where prototyping comes in. In short, prototyping is the process of bringing your ideas to life, testing them out in the real world, receiving critical feedback, and then iterating your design to make it even better.

Prototyping helps creators flesh out abstract concepts into physical products. It helps teams collaborate effectively and identify areas for improvement. Most importantly, it puts a test-and-learn methodology at the core of all product development—making the process drastically more effective than it would otherwise be.

Prototypes are essentially early models of products. That’s it. They’re not intended to be the final version that will eventually be sold to the public—instead, they’re preliminary versions that allow design and product teams to flesh out their ideas, see how they look, act, and feel in real life, and go back to the drawing board if necessary.

Imagine you’re building a brand new model of a car. You wouldn’t simply build the new model from scratch without testing it before putting it on the market. Instead, you’d build out the concept, put the first model through a rigorous series of tests, identify things that need to be changed, and then go back to the drawing board once more.

In fact, when building a car, you’d need to conduct hundreds of mini-tests (using prototypes to help you do this). You might build a prototype of your new steering wheel before testing it out. Or perhaps you’re creating a revolutionary AI-powered dashboard voice assistant. In this case, you’d probably have to create multiple iterations of this product before it performs to the standard that you expect.

Prototyping ensures that no stone is left unturned before a product hits the market. Imagine if you found that your steering wheel completely locks up when somebody turns it too quickly. Not only is this not supposed to happen, but it could be incredibly dangerous for people driving the car.

By producing a prototype, testing it out in the field, and seeing this problem occur, you can then make the necessary adjustments before producing another prototype

The primary goal of prototyping is to test designs, concepts, and ideas before creating a product or implementing final changes. The testing process allows you to gather critical feedback from customers and identify areas that need to be improved/redesigned going forward.

This means that your product will ultimately be better than if you hadn’t tested it out first, while also ensuring you don’t commit time, energy, or money into designing a product that is going to be subpar. Prototyping is also great for enabling collaboration—teams come together to build the prototype, test it out, gather insights, and analyze the feedback.

Still unconvinced? Here are some of the most compelling reasons to prototype:

Communicating your design intentions or apprehensions can be tricky. However, prototyping is a universal language that brings everyone working on a project together—and clearly communicates the results of any tests.

It provides a tangible, physical way of representing and communicating your ideas.

Prototyping validates assumptions and tests hypotheses, providing valuable contextual feedback along the way.

You can gain a true insight into your product’s usability.

Prototyping helps you gather key user research and reveals areas where you need to further optimize your product.

Test possibilities and detect usability problems or UX architecture issues early on, without compromising on a single solution.

Ensure that you validate all assumptions before you go ahead and fully develop your product. Don’t waste time and money developing something that will have to be redesigned later on.

It provides developers with a reference tool, drastically shortening development timelines.

Teams can see their ideas slowly but surely come to life as they iteratively build out their dream product.

It provides a sense of ownership to all concerned stakeholders.

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