Invest in prototyping

Invest in prototyping - a designer sketching out a UX design for feedback

Users know what they want when they see it. If you just ask, you’re likely not going to get the best data back.

However, they don’t always know straight away and immediate feedback isn’t always that good. Sometimes, new ways of doing things need to exist for some time before they’re accepted or adopted. So, it seems a quick and easy way to build ‘working’ experiences could be helpful in soliciting higher quality feedback.

Over the years, however, prototyping has managed to get itself a bad name. That’s because in the early days of visual tools such as Visual Basic and web based editors, people confused prototyping with working software and a lot of poor quality software found its way into production environments. Prototyping does not equal production code. It’s purely for the design process.

In this post from an engineer at Nike, they develop an argument for creating tools that helps to get useful feedback from users. They chose to build their own set as it best matched their own customer experiences and journeys, their own working processes, and their own specific areas of development.

Their tools support designers, engineers, and product stakeholders so they can quickly and cheaply test different aspects of their solutions.

Consider

Fast feedback is such a critical aspect for designing software, products, and services people love that it’s worth investing in. There are many great tools out there, but sometimes the best thing to do is build your own.