Prototype planning

Identifying and planning a prototype to validate crucial elements of your solution

Practical Information

What is this tool?

A tool that helps you plan your prototyping and testing by looking at the risk areas of your solution. The Prototyping Plan helps to plan for a test early on to see if (parts of) your idea work as you expected.

Why do we use it?

A prototype allows you to test your assumptions about how your idea will work before you invest in a fully developed solution. Generating a large amount of feedback from future ‘users’ of your solution, will result in a more relevant and successful solution.

Design phase:

Create & test loop

Materials:

Pen and paper, Print, Online tool

Time:

30 minutes - 1 hour

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A step-by-step guide

1. Define the objectives of your prototype by describing what you want to learn about your solution. Try to split up your idea in different phases or elements. It’s important to include the parts of your idea where you foresee major risks. These risks can be there when you have assumptions or when an element is crucial for your solution to be a success. 

2. Write down the assumptions you have about how your stakeholders use/interact with your solution. Define at least one assumption for each objective.

3.
Now use the objectives and the assumptions to make a storyboard for your prototype. Describe and visualise the activities that you will be testing with your prototype. Include a user in these sketches and how they interact with the prototype.




How other organisations used this tool

How to use the outcomes of the tool?

Use the Prototype plan to make one or several prototypes and to create a testing plan where you validate the assumptions by having users engage with the prototype(s).

Related tools

User journey
Making your idea come to live by describing it from a users perspective
If you have created a user journey you can use it to identify the elements you want to prototype.
Fail faire
Identifying potential risks and failures for your solution to turn them into opportunities
You can use the Fail faire before this tool to identify the major risk areas

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