How Products Get Rough Drafts
Products can have rough drafts too. To see how well they work and what people think of them, companies often create early samples—or prototypes—of potential products. Here are some examples of prototypes that turned into popular gadgets and gizmos (aplenty); sometimes, as in the case of the iPhone, they may look nothing like the product that ultimately made it to market. Learn more about the prototyping cycle by researching the the terms below, then discuss with your team: are there other things in life that would benefit from prototyping? Is there any difference between a prototype and a draft?
- sketches | storyboarding | paper prototypes | low vs. high fidelity
- wireframing | mockup | proof of concept | user testing
- minimum viable product | minimum marketable feature
The original iPhone prototype, code-named 'M68,' looked nothing like a phone — it was a bare red circuit board the size of a PC motherboard, and even the engineers building it didn't yet know what the final design would be. Products, it turns out, have rough drafts too.
Key concepts
- The Prototyping Cycle
- A build-test-refine loop — make a rough version, try it, gather feedback, improve, repeat — used to develop an idea before the final design is locked in.
- Fidelity
- How finished a prototype looks and works: low-fidelity is quick and rough (a paper sketch), high-fidelity is polished and interactive (a working mockup).
- Validating Before Committing
- Prototyping catches flaws early, while they're cheap — it costs far less to fix a paper sketch than a finished product.
- Prototype Versus Draft
- Both are imperfect early versions meant to be revised, but a draft is usually words or plans while a prototype is something you can see, touch, and physically test.
What to know
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Prototyping is structured trial-and-error: the whole sketch-test-refine loop exists to catch failures while they're still cheap to fix, so its real value is failing early and safely instead of late and expensively.
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