Iterative Mobile App Design & Prototyping
Why Prototyping Matters
Some ideas are not a simple twist on another idea. When they are, it’s a lot easier to skip the prototyping phase and get right to feature definitions, user experience designs and visual designs.
However, for ideas that are truly transformative, or even for ideas that have components that are new and don’t have existing parallels, prototyping is the most effective and efficient method for defining your product.
The Field of Dreams Myth
Have you ever seen the movie Field of Dreams? It’s one of my favorites. It’s clearly a fantastic story and yet people, even business owners, act like Ray Kinsella all too often.
Myth: What I’m talking about here is the “if you build it, he will come” mentality that if you build a great product, people will inevitably see and understand it’s value and will come running.
Truth: It is essential to have real customers involved in planning your product if you want it to be successful.
Customer Development & Prototyping
The absolute best path to defining a transformative idea is to leverage a real customer base. Identify and coordinate a sizable and yet manageable size of real users. These need to be users who will actually use your product. You’ll get their buy-in regarding anything from the usability of features all the way to cost and pricing model.
As you introduce new features you will test them using a blend of paper and functional prototyping. This allows us to get live feedback from users as they use your product. It ensures what we build next is truly the most valuable feature for your product right now.