 I heard this quote. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. And this got me thinking. Prototyping is one of the most crucial steps in my design process. It allows us, as UX designers, to create preliminary versions of the product. It can often make or break the final product. I've been designing products for the last 10 years and getting early feedback is crucial. Making updates to a prototype is much more convenient and cost efficient compared to revising a ship product. Let's start with a hotdog. Oh shit! Yes! I mean it allows us to test how people interact with the concept. So let's talk about what is prototyping, the step-by-step guide, then later in the video I want to talk about common pitfalls to avoid. So stick around for that. Prototyping. What is it exactly? Well a prototype is an example of a mock-up used to test a process or product built with varying degrees of fidelity to capture design concepts and test them with real users. Some of the high-value benefits are leveraging insights from team members verifying product market fit, improving user experience, eliminating waste, predict unexpected scenarios and usability problems, a standard for presentation, time and cost efficient. Without further ado, here is the step-by-step guide. First you want to establish a clear purpose. Without a defined concept you can easily set your product up for failure. The second is defining a prototype's requirements early. Ask yourself how real or complex does the prototype have to be to serve this purpose? Then you don't want to rely entirely on your prototyping tool. Think about ways that you can kind of fake the experience. Number four is you need to choose the right amount of fidelity. Is it medium? Is it high? Is it low? Who knows? Then you've got to think about how the prototype can be updated. Number six is reuse, reuse, reuse. For digital prototyping this means saving reusable templates, stencils, patterns and widgets for future projects. Then start with a disclaimer. Start every prototype review session with a disclaimer that this is just a prototype, a mock-up and it's not the actual solution. This reminds stakeholders and users that this is still work in progress and they won't get frustrated. Number eight, don't forget to test. The goal of this is to identify problems and areas to make improvements early so you can make the necessary changes. So let's get into the common pitfalls. I used to design products as quickly as I could to make deadlines so I can hand them off to developers and not make a back. A few weeks later the product has been released, we started getting feedback. I don't get it. How does it work? It was back. I didn't validate the flows, features or interactions before getting the developers to code my design. Months later we ended up needing full redesign. Static designs don't help anyone. So here's what to avoid. Don't be a perfectionist. Don't focus too much on the first good idea. Don't add too many features. Try to avoid the endowment effect. It's an emotional bias that causes the value that you put into your project higher and often irrationally higher than its market value. Don't prototype without a clear objective. Don't spend too much time explaining it. It's always better to show rather than tell. So when I started building UX Playbook I didn't sit by the computer and write 30,000 words. Instead I wrote one guide around 2,000 words about how I created Preda Personas. Uploaded it and wanted to buy me a coffee and tested it with a bunch of users. During that week someone randomly found it. Yeah no it was super lucky. They purchased it with zero marketing. From that UX Playbook was born. Nice. Building a prototype should be fast and even dirty. Nice. And if your prototype involves coding the actual code doesn't have to be perfect or clean. It just needs to do the job that it was intended to do. If you want to learn more about prototyping with detailed guides and templates check out the link in the description. Hit the big red button for another Playbook height breakdown of UX Playbooks. Bye!