Digital prototyping
By creating prototypes of your web application early in the design process, you can directly test and validate strategic choices with your audience. This is a crucial phase of any successful digital design project.
What exactly is digital prototyping?
A digital prototype is a clickable demo of the final website or application you are going to build. No code is involved. Because we specifically recreate the customer journey in a browser, tablet, or mobile, the prototype is hardly distinguishable from a real experience. This way, we can precisely test and validate how your audience reacts to it.
When do we apply digital prototyping?
We apply prototyping design to various design challenges. This mainly occurs when designing new websites and platforms. However, it also happens during a redesign or when we conduct a Design Sprint in which we build and test a prototype in a week for a new strategic challenge or innovation.
New insights from research data and new strategic directions can be directly translated into prototypes to test how your audience responds. Based on that, you can make decisions for the next steps.
Data and analytics are important for gaining new insights, however, they do not tell the whole story of the behavior being exhibited. We believe in the power of truly meeting your audience and involving them in the choices you make with your digital applications and platforms.
We see that working with prototypes and directly testing with the public works very well in involving stakeholders within an organization. Validation from your audience on whether something works or not is very helpful as an objective judgment on a particular strategic course.
By making adjustments early after testing with prototyping, you can save a lot of costs. At the moment you have taken a certain strategic course and it turns out that your audience reacts differently than hoped, you are far from home after many sprints. That is why we recommend always translating important choices into prototype designs.
Digital Natives is specialist in digital prototyping
Digital Natives was one of the first digital agencies in the Netherlands to actively work with prototyping using the Google Design Sprint. In 2016, we wrote about it in Frankwatching.
