Building Products People Love Using Prototyping Magic

Behind every great product is a process of exploration, iteration, and refinement. This is the magic of prototyping—transforming abstract ideas into tangible, testable solutions. Whether you're crafting a groundbreaking app, designing an innovative physical product, or refining a service experience, prototyping allows you to bridge the gap between concept and reality.

Prototyping Mindset

A prototype is a refined version of your product or service. Unlike pretotypes, which explore user desirability and business viability, prototypes test technical feasibility and refine your ideas. In the words of Alberto Savoia, “Make sure you are building ‘The-Right-It’ before you build it right.”

Prototyping is a foundational process for developing a new product through the physical representation of an idea. It helps designers transform a concept into a functioning item. Utilising basic sketches and rough materials, prototypes can be simple drawings or rough models that aid innovators in identifying areas for improvement in their designs. For example, architects might develop a scale model of a building to evaluate its design and functionality before construction begins.

All in all, prototyping plays a vital role in validating hypotheses about your solution's technical aspects. It helps answer questions like “How do we build it right?” and provides a platform for users to interact with your product, yielding valuable insights for further development.

The Pillars of Effective Prototyping

Effective prototyping relies on three pillars:

Desirability

Ensuring your product meets user desires is paramount. Prototypes help you test assumptions about desirability, allowing you to understand what users truly want. This step prevents you from building a solution that doesn't resonate with your target audience.

Feasibility

Technical feasibility is equally critical. Prototyping helps you address technical challenges and determine if your product can be built as envisioned. Identifying and solving feasibility issues early in the process saves time and resources.

Viability

Viability tests whether your product can succeed in the market. Prototypes allow you to assess market demand and willingness to pay. By validating viability, you reduce the risk of launching a product that lacks a sustainable business model.

‍

The Value of Prototyping: Transforming Ideas Into Reality

1. Risk Reduction  

Prototyping allows teams to identify potential usability and functionality issues early in the development process. Testing with real users ensures that the product resonates with its audience and performs as intended in real-world scenarios. By uncovering problems before full-scale production, teams mitigate risks and reduce costly errors.

2. Clarity and Team Alignment

Prototypes transform abstract ideas into tangible models, creating a shared vision among team members and stakeholders. This process not only highlights misalignments in features, dimensions, or design, but also fosters collaboration and better decision-making. A clear, hands-on approach ensures everyone is aligned and working toward a common goal.

3. User-Centric Development and Feedback

Prototyping embeds real-world user feedback into the development process, ensuring the product meets genuine needs. They allow for deeper exploration of how users interact with specific features. This user-driven approach reduces reliance on assumptions and ensures products are fine-tuned to match actual user behaviour.

4. Flexibility and Continuous Learning

Prototyping reframes failure as a valuable learning opportunity, adopting a “fail early to succeed sooner” mindset. Each iteration provides new insights, allowing teams to adapt quickly and align with changing market demands. By embracing continuous improvement, teams can refine their product effectively and stay ahead in dynamic industries.

5. Psychological and Motivational Impact

Engaging in prototyping boosts confidence and fosters creativity, reframing setbacks as stepping stones to success. The process instils a sense of progress, motivating teams to push through challenges while reinforcing their belief in their ability to innovate.

6. Credibility and Market Readiness

Prototypes not only inspire internal teams but also serve as powerful tools for engaging external stakeholders. Investors prefer tangible evidence backed by data from user testing over abstract pitches, and prototypes offer proof of a product’s potential. Demonstrating how feedback shaped development builds credibility and positions the product for greater success in the market.

Tips and Tricks

First and foremost, prototyping should have a purpose: to test a specific assumption. Without knowing what you’re trying to prove or disprove, prototyping becomes ineffective. So, form a hypothesis and let that guide the design, functionality, and goals of your test.

Be Quick

When creating prototypes, simplicity and cost-efficiency are critical. Build models that are fast and inexpensive to develop, but still capable of providing meaningful data. Don’t worry about making the prototype resemble your final solution; focus on proving or disproving your hypothesis. A creative, minimal approach often yields the best insights.

Don't Intervene

Once your prototype is ready, allow users to interact with it independently. Resist the urge to intervene, pitch, or defend your design. Instead, observe how users engage with the prototype and pay close attention to where their actions differ from your expectations. These moments of misalignment often provide the most valuable learning opportunities.

Build Cheaply

Iteration and speed are essential to prototyping. Aim for multiple low-fidelity tests per week, or one to two-week cycles for high-fidelity models. Rapid iterations prevent design fixation—the tendency to become overly attached to a particular solution—and help you stay focused on solving the core problem. By staying flexible and open to feedback, you’ll avoid falling into the sunk cost bias, where you continue investing in an unviable idea simply because of the time or resources already spent.

Think of your prototype as a vehicle to achieve your goal, not the goal itself. The “laws of the market” won’t change to accommodate your design preferences, so be ready to adapt your solution to align with market demands. A successful prototype is one that is right, rapid, and rough:

• Right: It effectively tests your hypothesis.
• Rapid: It’s built quickly and cost-effectively.
• Rough: It’s functional enough to test, without being over-polished.

By adhering to these principles, prototyping becomes an efficient, insightful, and impactful step in refining ideas and bringing market-ready solutions to life.

Prototype Resolution

From simple sketches to detailed interactive designs, prototyping is crucial for refining functionality and user engagement. However, not all prototypes are the same. The decision between low-res and high-res prototyping can greatly affect the design process, user feedback, and development results.   But what do we mean?

Low-Resolution

Low-resolution prototyping emphasises speed and simplicity. These prototypes focus on basic structure and functionality, often using hand-drawn sketches, sticky notes, or digital wireframes. The goal is to experiment with ideas quickly, test user flows, and validate core concepts without worrying about aesthetics.

Advantages:

• Quick to create and iterate.
• Cost-effective and accessible to non-designers.
• Ideal for brainstorming and early-stage feedback.

Drawbacks:

• Limited interactivity.
• Not visually polished, which may hinder user feedback on design preferences.

High-Resolution

High-resolution prototyping, on the other hand, brings designs closer to their final form. These prototypes feature realistic visuals, detailed layouts, and interactive elements that mimic the finished product. Tools like Figma, Proto.io, and Framer allow designers to refine aesthetics and test detailed interactions with users and stakeholders.

Advantages:

• Delivers a polished look and feel, enhancing user engagement.
• Enables testing of visual elements like colours, typography, and branding.
• Useful for stakeholder presentations and developer handoff.

Drawbacks:

• Time-intensive and requires design expertise.
• Costlier compared to low-res prototyping.

The decision to use low-res or high-res prototyping depends on the project stage and goals. Though, ultimately early stages use low-res prototyping to explore ideas, validate functionality, and test core concepts quickly. At later stages, you then transition to high-res prototyping when visual elements and detailed interactivity need testing or when preparing for development.

Prototype Examples in Action

Alex Grots, co-founder and CCO of EWOR, served as Managing Director at IDEO, where he played a key role in articulating the Design Thinking Method. Furthermore, he has initiated and led numerous innovation and entrepreneurship programmes at universities worldwide. From his wealth of experience comes many wonderful example of prototypes in action we would like to share with you.

Testing User Flows Using Paper Prototypes

When Alex and his team were developing a new user experience for customers who lost their credit or debit cards at a bank, they utilised simple paper prototypes crafted on Post-It notes to represent potential app screens. This approach enabled users to interact with the prototype, where each screen was a separate Post-It, allowing for continuous iteration until the user flow was intuitive. Only after refining the user flow with this low-fidelity method did they proceed to create more high-fidelity mock-ups.

Flexible Display for Drive-Thru ATM

Faced with the challenge of designing a flexible display for drive-thru banking ATMs, Alex's team needed to address the diverse range of vehicle sizes, from low sports cars to high SUVs. Instead of immediately investing in an expensive swivel arm mechanism for positioning the display, they opted for an innovative testing approach. By using a human to simulate the swivel arm's adjustability, the team quickly gathered user feedback on the experience. This creative, cost-effective solution provided crucial insights into the functionality and appeal of the design.

Electric Toothbrush for Kids

In a project aimed at designing an electric toothbrush for young children, Alex's team focused on critical factors such as weight and volume, acknowledging the underdeveloped fine motor skills of their target audience. By using Play-Doh to model different handle sizes, they effectively evaluated and refined the prototype’s dimensions to ensure suitability for small hands.

The Dimensions of an Airplane Toilet

In 2007, a new Passenger plane was being developed. There was a design competition ongoing amongst the design agencies. While most teams were working in 3D digitally, Alex and his team had instead built a 3D model of a cross-section of the plane at scale. 

The executives of the aircraft company aimed for the toilets to adhere to the legally required dimensions without exceeding them, both to conserve space and to facilitate the addition of extra seats in the plane. As such the team's prototype fit the legally required dimensions.

Then, they invited the executives to go into this toilet, put their pants down, sit down on the toilet and pull it back up and come out. Immediately, the executives saw that this toilet would be way too small for people to actually use.

This hands-on experience made it evident that the proposed dimensions were impractical, illustrating how direct interaction with a prototype can dramatically shift perceptions and decisions.

Service Prototypes

Alex and his team approached the McDonald’s self-service terminal project by prototyping the entire user journey. Constructed using IKEA furniture and printed menus and promotional materials, their makeshift McDonald’s store allowed participants to experience the full service workflow. Feedback was collected in exchange for a €10 voucher, providing actionable insights into the customer experience and refining the self-service concept before final implementation.

That's a Wrap

Prototyping is crucial in design, letting designers test and refine ideas before full-scale production. Low-res prototypes enable quick iteration and feedback early on, while high-res prototypes offer a polished look for later testing. With the right tools and creativity, prototyping can explore ideas, validate functionality, test user flows, and simulate real-world experiences. Don't shy away from using paper or Play-Doh—it might lead to groundbreaking insights and successful designs. Alex Grots says, "Designers are born curious." So start exploring! Keep prototyping until satisfied, and refine even after implementation. Great designs are never truly finished—they can always be improved.

Like what you've read and are ready to supercharge your startup journey? Explore our Founder Resources—the ultimate toolkit for founders, featuring expert-crafted templates, guides, and strategies to help you build, launch, and grow with confidence.

‍