Prototyping for Designers

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Prototyping for Digital Products

Software and app design are a huge opportunity area for directly impacting people. The internet and the active open source community has democratized software development. It’s easy to get started, and with merely a text editor, you can prototype interactive, engaging experiences. To take it one step further, a collaborative team can create useful products that can be scaled for mass use. By prototyping your digital product, you’ll learn how to improve your idea, and make it the next big hit, whether you’re at a startup or a well-established company.

The focus of this chapter is how to prototype for screen-based interactions and the larger experiences that include them. I won’t be covering how to code and implement designs, but I will give you actionable ways to prototype experiences and communicate design intentions to business stakeholders and developers.

Getting Started with Digital

The best way to get started in software design is to find a user need and to jump into solving it. The need can be something that seems silly, such as knowing exactly when it starts raining at your house, and building a smartphone app solution that notifies you if it detects rain outside. But by having an idea that solves a problem, you’ll have assumptions to test, and a good idea of where to start prototyping.

Scoping

A hard part about prototyping for digital products is preventing scope and feature creep of the product and the prototype. That means actively ...