The Value of Prototyping

It all started with a prototype

When the creator and founder of one of the most revolutionary underwear companies put a pair of scissors to her leggings, Sara Blakely gave birth to a billion dollar business. In this moment, she also created her first prototype.

And while the business part took a bit of time, the prototype took seconds to make, and served as the foundation to a wildly successful business that has helped millions of women worldwide.

Throughout my career, I've made heavy use of prototypes. While I haven't put scissors to pantyhose, I am committed to spending resources up-front to ensure a sound, appropriate solution down the road.

Why make prototypes?

Had Sarah Blakely not invested the first year of her company in continuous development and refinement of her product, SPANX either wouldn’t exist, or would’ve been invented by someone else. Much of her early success was due to the fact that she wanted to be different, and channeled that desire through proper user research.

Whether she knew it or not, Blakely was making perfect use of prototypes. Build fast, measure with the right people, learn, and iterate.

“As I'm making the prototype, which took me a year of working on it at night, and on the weekends, I learned so much as a consumer... I started testing my prototypes on real women, my mom, my grandmother, all my friends. And to this day, all of the Spanx products are obviously tested and worn by me and all of my friends and family and I really appreciate that honest feedback, it's what makes us better than what had existed out there.” - Sara Blakely

From pantyhose to pixels

In business terms, and certainly in a software company, the end goal of prototyping is to help us make money rather than lose it. When businesses prioritize up-front design thinking and inexpensive learnings early on, they quickly see that they avoid having to make major, extremely costly changes down the road. Specifically, prototyping saves money by helping:

• Validate and improve designs with actual users. You know, to make sure that we're actually building the right thing.

• Determine feasibility of designs. Better to know on day 1 than on day 101 that we can't build it.

• Create clarity on what's being engineered. This means less time debating and more time agreeing.

• Communicate ideas to stakeholders. Sometimes, to explain it, you just need to show it.

Unfortunately, companies don't always prioritize this, and end up learning the hard way.

A future without prototypes is… no future at all

As for the future of prototyping, I can’t be certain what will happen to tools like inVision or Axure, but what will never go out of style is the practice of inexpensively validating an idea early on, so that in the end, we make money rather than lose it. In short, prototyping early on will keep you from looking like Bill. Bill had an idea for one-eyed glasses, and then immediately ordered 100,000 units from a warehouse in China. He never validated his design with humans. He never made a single prototype. Now, he's scratching his head, wondering how he's going to pay off all his debt.

"It sounded cool when I explained it to the manufacturer."

“The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.” ~ Amari Cooper