Industry trends in prototyping

Excellent overview of prototyping. I'm just starting to work in an Agile process for the first time and it will be interesting and challenging to prototype in smaller chunks.

Although sketches are a great way to start generating ideas, the best way to test and refine these ideas is to simulate the way a person will interact with the thing being designed. These simulations illuminate aspects of the user experience that aren't immediately evident and help designers understand how all the moving parts work together. In fact, the very act of creating a prototype can cause a designer to imagine a better way of doing things. As Tom Kelley of IDEO puts it in The Art of Innovation:

"Call it serendipity or even luck, but once you start drawing or making things, you open up new possibilities of discovery." (Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation, p. 109.)

It is no coincidence that Apple, a company with a significant commitment to design, is also renowned for its reliance on prototyping. According to Leander Kahney, a journalist who has followed Apple closely:

"It's a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes time and money. Apple will do a hundred—that's how many they did of the MacBook. Steve Jobs doesn't wake up one morning and there's a vision of an iPhone floating in front of his face. He and his team discovered it through this exhaustive process of building prototype after prototype." (See iPhone pre-launch: Looking "Inside Steve's Brain".)

This clearly contradicts the popular (mis)conception that great ideas spring fully formed from the minds of great designers. Although it takes someone having that first spark of inspiration, great products are really culminations of the thousands of smaller, good ideas that came together to create a smooth, comprehendible, and compelling user experience. It is difficult to consider, let alone harmonize, all of these tiny parts without analyzing simulations to determine how a person will interact with them.

via www.adobe.com