Your Vision. Comes to Life.
We’ll take you from ideas for user interface and user experience to a vetted design ready to start building out your MVP.
Explore our 9-step process for creating a prototype in 3 project phases: Prepare, Produce & Perfect.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
The Product Concept Series fleshed out user stories which drive concepts around the pages that should be created. From this we also generate a list of the user interface elements we’ll use on our pages. Here is where you would list the charts, drag/drop controls, special calendar controls and like elements you expect to use.
The user experience is crucial to product adoption and user retention. You want to design a feeling you want the user to experience and an outcome you want them to achieve, using the jobs-to-be-done research you completed, so that your product is one that people tell others about. Define attributes that set your product apart from the competition in a way that benefits the users.
With the understanding we achieved in steps 1 and 2, we can now develop a standard for the look, feel and experience of each page. When we do things differently in different pages, we confuse the users and give them a bad experience. We develop a standard to avoid that confusion.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
We now start developing a vision for the fields and elements we need for each page. Pencil and paper or a whiteboard are your likely tools for this task as you rough out some general ideas. Concrete ideas are unwanted in this step. We want broad brushstrokes to leave room for the next step.
In this step, we want to design a flow for how the user steps through the application. If we had final draft pages from step 4, then our hands would be tied in this step. We want to brainstorm and view the application from the jobs-to-be-done perspective, with a vision on making those jobs easier and deeply intuitive with a view towards the decisions we made in the Prepare phase, such as for example, our UX goals.
Now it’s time to take that stab at a finalized page design that we can show users and get feedback on. These typically start as low resolution sketches. As we iterate in step 8, we may opt to increase the fidelity of our output, but that decision is often driven by the type of interactions we’re trying to achieve and are therefore project specific.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
This is where the really important work happens! Talking to prospective customers, the people who have jobs-to-be-done and are eager for solutions, is where all the magic happens. This is one of those steps where you make giant steps in the journey towards product/market fit, another great risk reduction opportunity.
Using careful discernment, you judiciously decide which feedback needs to be included and which you will set aside. You make those changes and go back to step 7, and you do this for as long as needed to get it “right,” understanding that a prototype can only get you so far, which is why an MVP is necessary.
Now that we have pages that users are satisfied accomplishes their goals, we go back to the UX goals and validate that we are achieving those goals. Changes are made as needed to resolve shortcomings.
Many product builders waste time and money by jumping past this step and moving right into the MVP build. Software Prophets provides decades of experience in building applications that users want to use and, in our experience, this is a big mistake. It leads to considerable rework after software has been created, when it is more costly to make changes. Often, those missteps can be sidestepped by taking the steps highlighted above.
Do you want to learn about the next product series in our Your Vision Builder Playbook? After completing this process, the next logical step would be The Product Test Series where we build the MVP.
If you would like some help or just have some questions about this, let’s schedule a time to talk by clicking this button and selecting a convenient time.