Prototyping is not a new concept to most entrepreneurs out there, Rapid prototyping plays a crucial role in start-ups at every single phase or stage. Whether it’s presenting the ideas to potential investors, preselling your idea, testing and defining different product features. It provides deep insights into the product functionality or design; this makes the product development phase much more efficient and effective.
What I have comes to realize is that rapid prototyping significantly reduces the risk associated with product development as well as fasten the production process. For this post, we are going to briefly look at how rapid prototyping can help you take your app idea off the ground.
Beginning at the simplest level
The basic underlying approach of the prototyping process is the production of highly functional models of any part or product. The whole process will enable you to rapidly develop your prototypes, incorporate new ideas and insights as well as improving and refining your prototypes through iterations while still adhering to the basic core and design of your project.
Starting at the lowest level doesn’t necessarily mean creating hand-drawn prototypes. Whether you are an expert or not, you can begin with no-code tools to visualize your concept and be ready to take full advantage of the open-source tools to develop all the wireframes with clear and precise features of your product layout, content, and concept.
Alternatively, you can use other design tools to create and develop your product mockups without necessarily coding not even a single line.
Rapid plastic molds
Review of all the prototypes against future users
Entrepreneurs are risk-takers when it comes to starting a start-up from scratch; they believe that their product will offer viable and valid solutions to problems that need to be solved. If you make a bet on a product that people are going to use and depend on, then you are bound to go all in and invest all your resources in it.
If things work out and you pass, then you’ll be ahead of the competition. Studies have shown that most start-ups are not successful on their first try. Even those that are successful on the first try, you’ll still need years of iterations and tweaking.
Once your prototype is ready, capture all the customer insights through interviewing and get to learn how the customers will interact with the product and how it works best for them. The only way you can validate the idea of your app start-up is by building the response for your product.
Repeating the entire process
The main goal and reason for prototyping are to fail quickly and cheaply to build a higher success rate for future projects. The whole prototyping process provides for the room you can make mistakes which will allow you to build the best version of the next prototype based on already tested data.
The idea is designing-reviewing-refining cycle rapidly to come with improved prototypes at a high and fast rate.