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The Importance of Rapid Prototyping

November 16, 2019

by

Amir M

Innovation is changing how businesses and brands work. Forward-thinking businesses are evolving around digital innovation, scaling their internal venture-like environments, and offering new services and products to customers like never before.


Traditional discovery and development methods are undergoing a shift that will require new frameworks and methods to support sustained competitiveness. Startups are no longer the leaders in adopting the latest methodologies in design and software development, and we’re witnessing more global and complex organizations disrupting from within. We believe that complex businesses are able to translate these innovative startup processes within their corporate structure and capitalize on their untapped digital opportunities to accelerate innovation.


Whether it is a small or a complex organization, Blackcreek’s framework of rapid prototyping has been utilized for product development across various industries and complexities. This approach helps focus cross-functional teams to drive innovation in areas that truly disrupt products, companies, and industries.


Traditional product development follows a linear sequence: concepts, mockups, and development. Failure at any of these points would often lead to a complete restart in the development process.


Rapid prototyping is an early, crucial phase in a typical agile product lifecycle that allows you to quickly design a series of interactive, interconnected wireframes that simulate the software experience.

It is a rapid and cost-effective method to elicit early design feedback and to facilitate usability testing.


DISCOVER


The discovery phase starts at the beginning of the product lifecycle. It allows you to gather insights that help identify the target user and their problem, and develop the solution that delivers the value proposition.


DEFINE


In this phase, the goal is to define the scope, reduce risk, and ensure success. The team should collectively narrow down the user stories and high level architecture, and define what success looks like.


EXPERIMENT & VALIDATE


The goal in this phase is to experiment with different prototypes to enable stakeholders to test their assumptions, validate their hypothesis, and mitigate risk.


They can also discover new insights that were not previously identified. A prototype is the most cost-effective way to validate and refine a product design before committing to software development in the product life cycle.


Rapid prototyping is a highly effective approach to solving user-centric problems; it enables you to quickly test your solutions and hypothesis. The goal with this exercise is to provide clarity on building solutions that address the needs of the end users.