Prototyping is a super important step in the Design Thinking process that you can come across. After you’re done coming up with the stupidest idea on paper, it’s time to put that idea into full force, on actual paper. Prototyping is another everyday thing everyone does when designing a project they’ve put so much time into. It’s simply taking the idea that you’ve thought of in your head and experimenting on other people. Prototyping can be done in many ways, such as but not limited to: sketching, building, mapping, wire-framing, and story-boarding. There are many ways to do a prototype that you can go either way and you’ll get different results to your solution.
In Design Thinking, prototyping becomes essential in gathering data about your solution, how the solution may impact people depending on their stances and thinking of new ways to better perfect it to appease to a large number of people. You’re taking the three other steps you’ve used throughout your project making and applying them to the final project after you’ve done some beta testing. As Rikke Dam and Teo Siang said in their article Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype “When designers want to determine and understand exactly how users will interact with a product, the most obvious method is to test how the users interact with the product.” If you want to get a better understanding of how people will interact and feel about the product, you will have to experiment with the product in a way that doesn’t show itself as a finished product. This is the case when it comes to Science and anything else that involves experimentation, even Game Design. With any idea you can think of, there is always a possibility of it either not boding well with what the people want or just faltering altogether because of it not applying to the problem at hand. And so to prevent the possibility of that happening, or at least lower it, experimentation has to be done in order to receive feedback on the idea which can also help in making it better.
This is what the professor had us do in class when going over prototyping. After we came up with our outlandish ideas and put them down on pieces of paper that resembled how something would look like on our perspective phones, we were then tasked to have everyone essentially playtest out apps and see how they interact and react to its interface and usability. We then ask the person playtesting our apps to give feedback on what they think of the app, what works, what doesn’t work and what needs to be fixed or added on to the app. We had to do this two times over each time with a different person in order to get different experiences from different people at once. More often than not, we would either get completely different feedback from different people or get the same criticism altogether, which further give the hint that our apps would need major improvements on one specific area in order to be better than it is.
With prototyping comes to an interesting experience that you will probably never have without doing this at least once. It’s always helpful to experiment on different ideas to see which one sticks out to you the most and becomes the most successful. Hence, without prototyping, there would be no need to innovate on different ideas for the future and people would just take things for granted. Otherwise, doing a simple beta test or sketch on the idea is more than enough to get feedback from a large number of people.
