Prototyping

You can use prototypes to:

• get feedback from users during usability testing or user research sessions
• engage with stakeholders - instead of just discussing abstract ideas, you can use a protype to demonstrate your ideas and gather feedback
• bring key parts of your service to life - prototypes help you evaluate and refine ideas as a team before making final decisions

Key roles involved in prototyping

Several roles are directly invovled in creating and iterating prototypes. These are:

• Interaction Designers - create and update the prototype, ensuring that interactive elements work as intended and meet design standards, such as the Scottish Government Design System
• Content Designers - provide and edit the prototype's content
• User Researchers - test the prototype with real users and create insights, based on user feedback, which help Interaction and Content Designer identify what changes are needed to improve the prototype

Prototyping in discovery

It's essential to start prototyping in the discovery phase. Sketching a simple representation of your service and its user journey is the easiest way to turn abstract ideas into something visual that will help your team plan and prioritise future work.

You can start developing basic prototypes using:

• a pen and paper - this can help get you started, although it's likely you'll soon want to move on to something more sophisticated for stakeholders
• one or more prototyping tools, such as Figma or Axure - Interaction Designers in the Scottish Government will often use Axure to prototype digital services using a prototyping kit
• Content Management Systems - Digital Publishing can help you use existing websites and platform to quickly build prototypes of your service's web pages

By the end of the discovery phase, you should have a plan for the alpha and beta phases, along with a clear understanding of your service's key pain points. Your alpha and beta plans should reflect a prioritisation of key pain points for iteration and testing. 

Prototyping in Alpha 

It's essential to prioritise the trickiest parts of your service for testing, but you should be looking to develop a full prototype of your service by the end of alpha.

Throughout alpha, you can use your end-end prototype to help you plan which parts of your service are sufficiently robust, in terms of having been tested and iterated with users, to be built in code. 

Prototyping in Beta 

The beta phases should be about refining your end-end prototype from alpha, and using it to code the remaining elements of your live service. You should also be finalising what you'll be prioritising for continuous improvement in live - typically non-essential improvements that cannot be resourced during beta.

Prototyping in live

You should maintain your prototype once your service is live - you can use it to test any improvements to your live service with users before you build the change in your coded service. 

The benefits of using non-code prototypes

Building a non-code prototype, using a tool like Axure, means you can quickly:

• test your prototype with users
• feed insights from testing back into the iteration of your prototype - iterating a prototype in a tool like Axure is much quicker than changing a coded prototype