Prototype

After sketching out ideas that were inspired by the insights generated from your research, you will want to evaluate some of the ideas or concepts with users. In the “Prototype” phase, we build out examples of the ideas in different fidelities to get user feedback.

A prototype is:

“An early mockup of a product, built to evaluate the concept or design with users. Prototypes can be paper-based or digital, with varying degrees of interactivity. They are often thrown away when done.”

Source: UX for the Life Sciences

If you are working on digital tools or services, you might begin to make prototypes using digital tools. For example, you might use Balsamiq, Keynote, or Powerpoint. You might also quickly build something using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

But you can also use paper and pen to build a simple prototype too!

Regardless of the type of prototype you make, the important thing is that the prototyping is done quickly so that you can test out different ideas.

And within the life sciences, it is important that your prototype contains real data if possible. So that when testing with users, they can focus on giving you feedback on the idea and implementation, and not on whether the data is scientifically correct and valid.