Prototyping

"Learning by doing" as been important aspect of my development journey until now. What I have observed many times in the work field is that people tend to drag the brainstorming and research sessions too long and with minimum output.

Visual representations of the insights you receive in every step of the process becomes very important for following reasons.

1) Keeping the stake holders in loop, since they understand visual representation better than hocus-pocus text dump. Tangible ideas are well perceived than the conceptual ideas.

2) A sketch will be a conversation starter, these discussion might steer the team towards solving the real problem statement instead of chasing a hypothetical statements.

3) Tangible documentation that can be followed up by a colleague in future iterations.

4) With a Review - Refine/throwaway goal, you don't invest lot of time/resource and love to the designs, which helps in fail early and often till you reach a validated solution.

Most important part of prototyping is the learning you receive, which will help improve skill and know quickly what works and what doesn't.

Stay away from LOCAL MAXIMA: is a scenario when the team is working towards a solution and reach its best iteration quickly which then creates a dead end to go any further. But if the team hasn't already invested on lot of development time for reaching the local maxima, and have reached there from quick prototyping, they will clearly see the parallel iteration in a different direction which has a huge potential for further growth.

Prototyping and simultaneously discussing and sharing with the users and stakeholders gives very valuable feedback that one could have got only after development and user testing. It also creates a sense of owner ship among the users and stake holders which turns out to be very beneficial in the product lifecycle.

I have also observed a very interesting aspect in such scenarios, I have been a part of. The team of stake holders, product managers, developers and potential users get pumped up and excited for every meeting with the design team. It is almost as if they are the 'taste testers' for a new set of baked goods a bakery is offering. After listening to the story of 'why we arrived at particular prototype' , how it works and a constructive discussion/ feedback session, the whole team reaches a point of pleasant work satisfaction since they can clearly see the progress from the last meet. These days every professional is striving towards achieving work satisfaction end of the day, if prototyping is giving a taste of the same, it is definitely something to work towards.