Coming up with a great idea is exhilarating but getting it in the hands of potential customers is even more exciting. Creating a prototype makes it possible for you to validate your world-changing idea because you can get the concept out of your head and in front of users or potential investors.
Prototyping is a key component of the development process that helps bring your project to life while still leaving space for refinement. Marketplace Studio takes a unique approach to prototypes through the process of Design Thinking, where we challenge UI/UX to create a project that your users will love.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that combines transformative ideas, viability, and a designer’s desire to understand the consumer or user on a deep level. Design thinking isn’t just an imperative practice that we integrate into each phase of development, but it’s also a huge competitive advantage that sets your business apart from your competitors, directly impacting your businesses growth and bottom line.
Design thinking is a common thread that you will find meticulously woven into each one of our software development projects. We use design thinking as our methodology to grow and expand upon your idea by empathizing with your intended user. Leveraging design thinking makes it possible for us to create an innovative prototype that we can then use to test and validate your big idea.
What is a Prototype?
A prototype is a functional example of whatever you’re trying to build. If your end goal is to build a product like an app, you will need to develop a prototype to validate your idea and gain feedback from potential customers. Developing a prototype will help you determine if your product is addressing a real need and it will also help you determine if the product you’ve created helps the user reach their intended goal.
Whether you’re building an app or a website, it's extremely important to test your prototype before you write a single line of code. Oftentimes founders are blinded by wanting to create their product and they fail to see the downside of creating a product that is fully coded before doing user testing. Backtracking and making iterations to your code is extremely expensive and time consuming and it's completely unnecessary during this stage of development. Making costly changes to your code can be easily avoided by simply creating an MLP with no code. Are you interested in learning more about developing an MLP? Click here!
Work with a Designer not a Developer
Creating a prototype with no code will allow you to leverage your designers instead of developers so you’re able to make iterations to your prototype economically and efficiently. If your users can’t find what they’re looking for or if they don’t enjoy your UI/UX you can make rapid changes without wasting precious resources.
If you decide to move forward with coding your prototype your developers may spend weeks or even months writing code for your product and if you haven’t pre-emptively conducted thorough user tests, you will run into all sorts of problems that are extremely expensive to fix. If you conduct user testing during the design process, it means you can make iterations through your design team.
Your users’ opinions matter most so why not get their feedback before you code something that they may not like or be able to use?
Save Time and Money
It’s much more cost effective to make changes early in the development process than it is to make iterations later on. It’s estimated that it's 100 times cheaper to make a change before any code is written than it is to wait until after the implementation is complete.
You will save tons of time and money by making changes to the product while it’s still being designed. After you’ve gathered enough user feedback your designers can make iterations and improve your product at a fraction of the price that it would cost if your developer or engineer had to go in and change it in the code.
Test and Validate Before you Code
Testing and validating your product before you go all in will save you precious time and resources. It will also provide you with a sense of peace knowing you're allocating your businesses resources effectively while validating your concept every step of the way.
Interested in Learning More?
Kommentare