How Products Get Rough Drafts

Key concepts

Every work — at a glance

• iPhone M68 Prototype — Apple (prototype)

  The original iPhone's development board — a bare red circuit board the size of a PC motherboard with a screen bolted to one corner, built to answer whether the radio and the screen worked at all.

• Sketches (method)

  The fastest, cheapest prototype: a drawing costs a minute, so you can make twenty and throw away nineteen without flinching.

• Storyboarding (method)

  A sequence of rough frames showing what someone sees and does at each step — borrowed from animation, and the one tool that shows the journey between screens rather than a single screen.

• Paper Prototypes (method)

  Hand-drawn screens a real user 'operates' by pointing, while someone opposite swaps the sheets to play the part of the computer.

• Low vs. High Fidelity (concept)

  How closely a prototype resembles the finished thing — a scribble at one end, a clickable replica at the other. The skill is matching fidelity to how much you still do not know.

• Wireframing (method)

  The skeleton of a screen — grey boxes where things go, no colour or images — so the argument stays about what matters most, not about the shade of blue.

• Mockup (method)

  Exactly what the finished product will look like, and nothing working behind it — so realistic that executives routinely mistake it for a thing that already exists.

• Proof of Concept (method)

  A small, deliberately ugly build whose only job is to show that the riskiest assumption is not fatal — can this run in time, will this material hold?

• User Testing (method)

  Watching real people try the thing, under one rule: you must shut up, because the product will not be there to explain itself to the next person.

• Minimum Viable Product (concept)

  The smallest version you can actually release and still learn something true from real users — an experiment with a hypothesis attached, not just a cheap product.

• Minimum Marketable Feature (concept)

  The smallest slice of function a customer would value and pay for — the MVP asks what we can learn, this asks what we can sell.

• Nintendo PlayStation — Sony (prototype)

  The CD add-on Sony built for Nintendo's SNES, shown at CES in 1991 and abandoned when Nintendo switched to Philips — it became the PlayStation.

• Motorola DynaTAC — Motorola (prototype)

  The first telephone you could carry away from a car, patented in 1973; the first call on the prototype went to a wrong number.

• Apple I — Steve Wozniak (prototype)

  Designed after one garage club meeting in 1975 and sold from July 1976 at $666.66, about two hundred of them.

• Atari VCS (2600) — Atari (product)

  The 1977 console that made a microprocessor and swappable cartridges normal, so the machine stopped being the game.

• Super Soaker — Lonnie Johnson (prototype)

  Built in 1982 from PVC pipe, Plexiglass and an empty soda bottle; the line has since taken more than a billion dollars.

• DirectX Box — Microsoft (prototype)

  Four Microsoft engineers gutted Dell laptops in 1998 to prove a Windows games console could work; the name shortened to Xbox.

• Esslinger's 1983 Apple Tablet — Hartmut Esslinger (prototype)

  A touchscreen-and-stylus slab drawn for Apple in 1983 and never built — right, and twenty-four years early.

• Jobs' 1983 'Computer in a Book' — Steve Jobs (prediction)

  A 1983 speech describing a book-sized computer with a radio link — a tablet named in full, twenty-seven years early.

What to know

1. 01
   Is there any difference between a prototype and a draft? Both are cheap first versions built to be revised, but a draft describes what will happen while a prototype tests it — you hand it to someone and watch reality push back, which is why the prototyping cycle keeps producing surprises a plan never does.
2. 02
   What else in life would benefit from a rough draft? Anything you can build small and let reality answer: a lesson taught to one class before the whole year, a park chalked onto the pavement before it is paved, a menu run for a single night.

Across subjects