If you’ve ever put a lot of time, money and energy into launching a seemingly perfect product into the market and only to find out that very few customers actually want it, then you’re in a perfect place to understand the value of prototyping. 

Many products, even those developed by some fortune 500 companies sometimes fail in the market although a lot of investments and planning have gone into it. It goes without saying that even products that have gone through the design process (including the prototyping phase) have the potential to fail. Which is all the more reason why understanding how prototyping works and most importantly getting the needed customer inputs in the process is essential. 

In a nutshell, prototyping helps you be sure you are “building the right it, before building it right”.

The three essential reasons below capture the essence of prototyping

1. It helps the team develop a better understanding of what the end product will/should be. Ideally, various stakeholders in your business will be involved in the process and thus build more team work and leverage group expertise

2. 2

   It allows you to learn from the user/customers what he or she really wants and not just what you think they want. There may be instances where while going through the prototyping phases your feedback from the customer would show you an entirely new product idea which is more likely to be successful.

3. 3

   Prototyping helps you fail fast and cheaply. Investing resources into one single prototype to test out viability is certainly better than investing in a whole line of products with a higher potential cost of failure.