“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”
Step 4 in the Design Thinking Process is Prototype
Being able to utilize prototyping in your design is a deal breaker in whether your design is going to stand out or look terrible. One of the best ways to gain insights in the design thinking process is to carry out some form of prototyping. This process can help bring one’s design ideas created come to life.
In the article, “Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype” it says “This method involves producing an early, inexpensive, and scaled down version of the product in order to reveal any problems with the current design. Prototyping offers designers the opportunity to bring their ideas to life, test the practicability of the current design, and to potentially investigate how a sample of users think and feel about a product” (Dam and Siang). These words are extremely important because it goes to show how important the prototype stage is in the design thinking process.
The article also mentions that prototypes are often used in the final, testing phase in a Design thinking process in order to understand how users behave with the prototype, to reveal new solutions to problems with the current design that has been created.
Prototyping is so important to designers in the design thinking process. This is because it offers designers the opportunity to bring their ideas to life, to be able to test the practicability of the current design, and to be able to investigate how a sample of users think and feel about a product.
Therefore, utilizing the prototype as one of the end stages in ones deign is a very important skill that designers should learn and understand. This knowledge can help designers bring their designs to a new level with this type of information and the prototype itself to see how users behave with the prototype. Designers who don’t utilize prototyping won’t excel as much as those designers who do.