I’m going to try out a new concept where I do a series of consecutive posts all on the same topic: prototyping. It’s an attempt to organize my thoughts and start to articulate an important set of ideas that I think could help a lot of people.
Before we dive in, I want to be clear about what a prototype is. The definition would say “a first, typical or preliminary model of something, especially a machine, from which other forms are developed or copied.” But that doesn’t help all that much.
Rather than defining a prototype by WHAT it is, let’s think about WHY it is. Prototypes are built to test assumptions. Example: Instead of spending millions of dollars on manufacturing, we’ll build a cheap prototype and see how customers respond first.
I propose two main purposes of a prototype:
- Testing assumptions
- Gather rich data
Testing assumptions is a crucial part of building anything new. When you start out, you will have countless preconceived notions about how it should work, why it will work and who will use it. Most of those ideas are wrong, but you will never discover that until you start prototyping. Thus, your prototype should be constructed in such a way that it will test certain assumptions you have about the project.
An assumption can be as fundamental as “users will find this helpful” to as granular as “users will click this button on this screen in this situation.”
Secondly, prototypes will help you gather rich data that you otherwise would not be able to collect. It’s easy to create an elevator pitch and tell it to people you meet. They might react in some way to your idea, but those interactions will never lead to rich data collection. Instead, if you handed someone a rough version of a physical product you built to solve their problem, you could see them interact with it, try to use it, and give up. All of those moments are opportunities to collect rich, meaningful data. After all, real users will be using your product in the real world so you better know what it looks like and feels like.
Given these two purposes of a prototype, over the next week or so I am going to give examples of great prototypes. A great prototype is quick, cheap and easy to execute. We’ll talk about well known companies like ProductHunt, all the way down to tiny startups like Revive. Stay tuned,
Zack