Why We Prototype
Making Ideas Feel Real
WRITTEN BY DAN SCHECHTER, GROUP EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
We’ve all been charmed by our own ideas. They make so much sense to our brain, feeling brilliantly clear and clever. Yet once we begin making, we often discover that those ideas are flawed, impossible to make, or suffer from some logical gap our brain just leapt across. In that moment, the limits of thought become clear. And so does the power of making.
There is a lot of uncertainty in making something new. Will it work? Will it make sense? Will it look good? The path from idea to execution is full of unknowns that challenge our ability to evaluate ideas, build confidence in them, and convince others to believe in them.
Between thought and
expression lies a lifetime.
Prototypes address this uncertainty. They are platforms to prove out new thinking, allowing us to try things in native formats. They help us simulate ideas, so they feel real, without being real.
Almost any idea can be prototyped. You can prototype a process, a user experience, an installation or even a video. They are experiments that can take many formats. What they share is a commitment to try something and an openness to evaluate it in its incompleteness. They bring thought closer to expression, so we can better evaluate our ideas.
Prototypes and interactive design
Conceptualizing interactive experiences introduces even more uncertainty. The medium itself is inherently more complex than static or linear media, changing with time and input. They are shaped by user behavior, reflecting context and state. They’re inherently tactile and driven by feedback. Neither image nor video can adequately portray this complexity.
Interactive prototypes have two main goals:
- Evaluating technology: Can we build this?
- Evaluating experiences: Does this feel right?
No matter their goal, prototypes are an essential part of making interactive experiences. They are not an end of the process. They are a step in the process. They are waypoints between thought and expression built to answer a specific question or experience a specific idea.
And as much as prototypes allow us to test limits, they also allow us to see new possibilities. Prototyping is an additive tool in creative decision making and should happen during design, not after.
Prototyping is design.
Ingredients of a prototype
There are no rules in prototyping, but there are ingredients to success. Here are some dos and don’ts that have guided our work.
Every prototype begins with a question, hypothesis, or problem. Simple or complex, root the prototype in answering that question. You can ignore other things.
Think slowly. Try quickly.
Designers and developers are too often hesitant to prototype, wary to rush things or afraid that creating something imperfect isn’t valuable. We’re told to ‘fail fast’ but never taught how to do it. Yet becoming comfortable with trying things with the willingness to throw them out is essential to interactive design. Embracing this helps us evaluate ideas quicker—not just to be more efficient, but to make our ideas better.
In design, speed is valuable and even enviable, but it isn’t virtuous. Design deserves and often requires time to succeed. But design that lingers in the realm of thought and conversation for too long often just wastes time. Speculation is essential in creating new experiences, but the question of ‘what if?’ can often be answered quickly, ushering speculation into informed decision making.
At a time when generative AI is redefining the relationship between thinking and making, prototyping not only remains important, it is more accessible than ever. These new platforms have eroded our excuses as much as they have accelerated our abilities. Making ideas feel real has never been easier.
So go prototype something. Try to make your idea feel real. It will be better for it once it is real.
