Process: Prototyping

A prototype is a primitive representation or version of a product that a design team or front-end-development team typically creates during the design process. The goal of a prototype is to test the flow of a design solution and gather feedback on it—from both internal and external parties—before constructing the final product. The state of a prototype is fluid as the team revises the design iteratively based on user feedback.

Why Are Prototypes Important?

Tom and David Kelley of the design company IDEO have perfectly summed up the importance of prototyping by saying:

“If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.” Read More

Throughout my career as a user experience designer, I have continually asked myself three questions:

• What should my deliverables be?
• Will my deliverables provide clarity to me and their audience?
• Where do my deliverables and other efforts fit within the spectrum of UX design?

I have found that, if I do not answer these questions prior to creating a deliverable, my churn rate increases and deadlines slip.

When attempting to answer the third question, I use a framework I discovered early in my career: The Five Competencies of User Experience Design.PDF This framework comprises the competencies a UX professional or team requires. The following sections describe these five competencies, outline some questions each competency must answer, and show the groundwork and deliverables for which each competency is responsible. Read More

As artificial-intelligence (AI) technology advances, traditional user-experience methods must adapt to effectively address the dynamic and relational nature of new autonomous agents. The state of user interfaces has shifted dramatically from interactive systems with fixed, finite states to adaptive AI agents that are capable of flexible, even infinite interactions. Today’s AI-powered user interfaces don’t just respond to commands, they adapt, learn, and interact in ways that mimic human conversations and interactions.

As AI agents evolve to exhibit open-ended interactions, prototyping becomes crucial for UX designers to truly understand and effectively test these dynamic systems—going far beyond the requirements of traditional user-interface design. In this new era of the design of autonomous-agent experiences, UX designers need to more frequently and rapidly prototype throughout the design process and strengthen their skills in computational design to achieve optimal success. Read More