Prototyping is the fastest and most cost-effective way to define and experiment with a project. These two reasons alone already warrant their importance, yet it is still common to see systems taking shape before any draft.
As much as the requirements gathering alone raises a plethora of information that should be laid out in the interface, it is during the actual user interaction with the system that the details really get realized. To design the perfect experience, using prototypes is the most effective way to simulate this interaction and should be done during the system design period, avoiding costly time and money expenditures.
Usability is playing a steadily more important role in software development. This can be seen in many ways, including the growing budgets for usability engineering.
The more advanced the project is, the greater the impact to make corrections or changes to its code. It's easy to imagine: Changing the programming of certain functionality on a system takes more time than redoing your draft several times. Therefore, the time spent on prototyping is inversely proportional to the time required for programming. In other lines, the more time you dedicate to the prototyping phase, the lower the time spent on its implementation.
Benefits:
- Low demand for development time and consequently low cost
- No advanced knowledge in graphic editing software
- Facilitates product visualization for the customer from an early stage
- Enables you to receive customer feedback in a timely manner
- Facilitates requirements and functionality survey
- Enables you to more accurately estimate complexity and development time
- Enables interaction testing
- Reduces development efforts
