Prototyping is a crucial step in the design thinking process. Learn all about design thinking prototypes and why they matter in this guide.
If you want to create products that truly resonate with your users, you can’t just jump straight from ‘idea’ to ‘design’. You first need to test your ideas to make sure that they’re really worth developing.
This is where design thinking prototypes come in.
Prototypes enable you to visualize and communicate your ideas, and test them on real or representative users. This can help identify conceptual flaws and usability issues before you spend time and money on implementation.
Prototypes don’t just make smart business sense. They’re essential for creating user-friendly products that actually work in the real world.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including:
- What is a prototype in design thinking?
- What is the purpose of a prototype in design thinking?
- The different types of design thinking prototypes
- Ideas and inspiration for creating design thinking prototypes
- Prototyping best practices
- The takeaway
Let’s begin.
What is a prototype in design thinking?
In design thinking, a prototype is a model that represents the idea, solution, concept, or product you want to test. Design thinking prototypes can be digital or physical, and the level of detail varies depending on how well-developed an idea is.
We’ll explore the different types of design thinking prototypes in section three of this guide. For now, let’s recap on what design thinking is and where prototyping fits into the process.
What is design thinking? A quick recap
Design thinking is an iterative, empathy-driven approach to solving problems and coming up with solutions.
It prioritizes the end user throughout, encouraging you to understand and define the problem users need you to solve, and then to brainstorm, prototype, and test your ideas before you go ahead and develop them.
This helps to determine whether or not your proposed solutions are actually effective and feasible — before you spend time, money, and resources building and implementing them.
There are five main phases in the design thinking process:
- Empathise: This is where you get to know your target audience and understand their needs. This stage involves activities such as conducting user research, creating empathy maps, and developing user personas.
- Define: The next step is to clearly define and frame the specific user problem you want to fix. This is based on what you’ve learned about the target users and the challenges they face.
- Ideate: This is where you get creative and come up with as many different ideas as possible — that is, ideas for how to solve your end-user's problems. You’ll then narrow down a large pool of ideas to a couple that you’d like to explore further. You can learn more about ideation (and the different techniques used) in this guide.
- Prototype: At this stage, you visualize your ideas and think about how they might take shape. This involves creating prototypes: physical or digital representations of ideas that you can test and validate (or invalidate) before developing them further.
- Test: This is where you test your prototypes — ideally with real users or research participants who closely represent your target audience. Through rigorous testing, you can check whether your ideas are effective and worth continuing with, or if you need to go back to the drawing board.
That’s design thinking in brief. For a more detailed exploration of the topic, refer to our full guide: What is Design Thinking? Everything You Need To Know.
What is the purpose of a prototype in design thinking?
The main purpose of a prototype in design thinking is to visualize and represent your ideas. This enables you to:
- Think, in more concrete terms, about how your ideas should take shape, taking them from abstract concepts to tangible solutions.
- Communicate ideas and concepts to key stakeholders, allowing you to gather initial feedback.
- Test early-stage ideas and concepts on real users or research participants — helping you decide whether to move forward with an idea and develop it further, or whether you need to return to the ideation stage and come up with a more effective solution.
- Test more advanced concepts and ideas to identify usability issues or design flaws and iterate accordingly.
- Reduce the risk (and cost) of developing and launching an untested idea that turns out to be ineffective in the real world.
Why prototyping is so important in design thinking: A hypothetical example
Let’s say you’re designing an app to help newly retired people connect with fellow retirees and find local opportunities to socialize and get involved in the community.
You think you know enough about your target audience to design the app without prototyping and testing. You brainstorm all the features you believe the app should include, discuss them with your team and key business stakeholders who give you the thumbs-up, and then go right ahead and design the app in its entirety.
You’re certain you’ve created an outstanding product — but, when you launch the app, it doesn’t quite resonate with your target audience in the way you’d hoped.
Your users report feeling overwhelmed by the vast array of features and functions available. At the same time, they point out that there are certain missing features that they would have liked the app to include.
With prototyping and testing, this scenario could have been avoided. By creating prototypes to model how the app would look and function, and testing those prototypes on target users, you would have discovered the issues with your designs before getting them developed and launched. Based on user feedback, you could have focused on the features your users really wanted and launched a product that hit the mark.
Ultimately, prototyping in design thinking is an important safeguard against designing and building products that fail to meet your end users’ needs.
The different types of design thinking prototypes
There are several different types of design thinking prototypes, and they vary in terms of both detail and format. Prototypes can be digital or physical and can range from low-fidelity (i.e. low-detail) models to more realistic high-fidelity representations.
Here are the main types of design thinking prototypes.
Low-fidelity prototypes
Low-fidelity prototypes are highly simplistic representations of your ideas. They’re not concerned with the finer details; rather, they’re used to visualize the broader overall concept.
Low-fidelity prototypes used in design thinking include:
- Hand-drawn sketches that represent, say, how an app screen might look or how a user might interact with a particular feature or product.
- Low-fidelity wireframes, either hand-drawn with pen and paper or created digitally using dedicated wireframe tools or software. These simple, static wireframes are used to depict the overall layout of a digital screen. They don’t typically include specific details such as text or color.
Low-fidelity prototypes are used to capture and hash out very early-stage ideas and concepts. They can be more experimental and unformed, allowing you to explore multiple concepts before committing to a specific idea or design direction.
Mid-fidelity prototypes
Mid-fidelity or medium-fidelity prototypes depict your ideas in more detail, but they’re still not fully functional or entirely representative of how the final product might look or behave.
Just like their low-fidelity counterparts, mid-fidelity prototypes can also be created physically or digitally. Some common versions of mid-fidelity prototypes used in design thinking include:
- Paper models or mockups that provide a physical representation of how the product might look and function. These are a step up from low-fidelity, hand-drawn sketches. You might use paper and pens to physically model both the individual screens within an app and how those screens connect with each other.
- Clickable digital wireframes that simulate basic interactions with a product (say, a mobile app) and depict the overall navigation and flow of the design.
- Storyboards — a sequence of illustrations that depict how a user interacts with a product or feature, broken down into chronological steps or “scenes.” This type of design thinking prototype focuses on the user’s journey and the overall interaction.
High-fidelity prototypes
As your ideas advance and the finer details come into focus, you’ll create high-fidelity prototypes. These closely resemble the final product in terms of visual appearance and functionality, and they’re often used for late-stage testing just before the product is developed.
Examples of high-fidelity prototypes used in design thinking include:
- Fully interactive clickable prototypes, created using specialist UX design software such as Figma, Sketch, and Proto.io (to name just a few). These prototypes closely resemble a real digital product (like a mobile app or a website) and simulate how it feels to navigate and interact with the product as if it were live.
- Detailed 3D models. If you’re creating prototypes to test a physical product, you can create high-fidelity models using various materials to replicate how the real product will look, as well as to experiment with different scales and dimensions.
Service prototypes
While we often think of web design and mobile app design when exploring design thinking, it’s important to bear in mind that it also relates to the design of intangible solutions and services.
Prototyping for services focuses on the user journey and their interaction with the service — at specific touchpoints, for example, or holistically across the entire service experience.
Some common design thinking prototypes used in service design include:
- Role-playing. This involves acting out the service experience to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
- Customer journey maps or user journey maps. These provide visual representations of the user’s experience across different touchpoints within the service, helping to highlight where and how the experience could be improved.
As you can see, design thinking prototypes increase in detail and fidelity as your ideas and concepts evolve and become more refined. The closer you get to a final solution, the more complex and realistic your prototypes will become.
Ideas and inspiration for creating design thinking prototypes
Want to get hands-on with prototyping? Here are some fun exercises to help you get creative, experiment with building different types of prototypes, and experience first-hand why prototyping is so useful.
Create 1-minute prototypes
Creating rapid, low-fidelity prototypes helps to prevent overthinking and encourages creativity. The goal is to sketch out a simple visualization of an idea using just pen and paper — with the timer set for one minute.
Give it a go:
Set a timer for one minute and sketch out the home screen layout for an app of your choice (say, a dating app, a language-learning app, or a recipe app). After the minute is up, review what you’ve created. Then repeat the same exercise four more times (creating four more prototypes, with one minute for each). At the end, you’ll have five low-fidelity prototypes to explore.
Prototype collaboratively
Prototyping doesn’t necessarily need to be a solo activity. If you want to leverage a variety of perspectives and ideas, try creating prototypes as a group. You might invite stakeholders from different departments, for example, to see how they each envision your idea taking shape.
Give it a go:
Once you’ve defined the user problem you want to solve and come up with solutions you want to explore (as per stages two and three of the design thinking process), gather a small group of team members or stakeholders and ask each person to create a simple, hand-drawn sketch of how the solution should look.
Give each participant paper and pens/pencils, set a timer for 15 minutes, and have everybody focus on creating their prototypes. Once the 15 minutes are up, invite each member of the group to present their prototype and answer questions.
Once everybody has presented their prototypes, work together as a group to create a single prototype that combines the best ideas from each.
Experiment with different materials
If you want to get a feel for the prototyping process, consider building a prototype for a physical product. Experimenting with different materials is a great way to spark your creativity and explore the different forms and functions a product might take.
Give it a go:
Gather a variety of different materials such as cardboard, tin foil, foam, clay, string, buttons — anything you can get your hands on — and choose a random physical product to prototype. You might prototype a kitchen appliance, a musical instrument, or something for your pet; anything that comes to mind.
The goal is not to create a polished, functional product, but rather, to explore the physical properties of product design and immerse yourself in the art of prototyping.
Try role-playing and body storming
For a truly immersive prototyping exercise, try role-playing and bodystorming. This is where you take on the perspective of your target users and act out different scenarios relating to the product or solution you’re designing.
This is a great way to cultivate empathy throughout the prototyping process and to have a bit of fun with prototyping away from your computer screen.
Give it a go:
Choose a scenario related to your design challenge — a customer trying to open a new bank account, for example, or a group of remote colleagues trying to improve the efficiency of their meetings. Assemble a small team to take part in the role-play, assign each member a specific role, and act out the scenario you want to explore.
After the role-play, discuss the overall interaction, focusing on challenges and hurdles that came up, as well as any particularly successful or smooth moments. This will help steer you in the direction of an effective solution.
Use digital design thinking prototyping tools
If you’re prototyping for digital products like apps and websites, experiment with a variety of digital prototyping tools to see what’s possible with each platform.
Tools like Figma, Sketch, and Proto.io allow you to create fully interactive, high-fidelity prototypes that closely resemble how the finished product will look and function. Understanding how these tools work will elevate your prototyping process.
Give it a go:
Choose two or three digital design thinking prototyping tools you want to focus on — say, Figma, Sketch, and Proto.io. Set yourself a specific prototyping challenge (or focus on a real prototyping task you’ve got on your to-do list) and create a prototype in each of your chosen tools.
Explore all the different features and functionalities of each tool and see how they guide you through the prototyping process. This will not only help you to learn important industry-standard tools but will also encourage you to explore different approaches to creating high-fidelity prototypes.
Prototyping best practices
Now that we’ve explored design thinking prototypes in detail, here are some best practices to bear in mind when creating your own.
Prototype based on where you’re at in the design process
There are many different types of prototypes in design thinking, ranging from low-fidelity hand-drawn sketches to interactive digital prototypes, and everything else in between. It’s important to choose the right kind of prototype depending on where you’re at in the design process.
If you’re in the very early stages of coming up with ideas and concepts, focus first and foremost on low-fidelity prototypes. At this stage, it doesn’t make sense to create high-fidelity prototypes as you’re not yet thinking about the finer details of your product.
If, on the other hand, your ideas are already well-developed and you’re refining the final details, you’ll want to create more complex, realistic prototypes.
Set clear goals and objectives
In design thinking, creating prototypes goes hand-in-hand with testing. So, as you create your prototypes, set clear goals and objectives for what you want to test. This will enable you to establish a benchmark for deeming whether or not an idea is worth pursuing further.
Let’s say you’re designing prototypes to test a new feature for a fitness app. The new feature you’re creating should enable users to log their workouts and access key statistics such as how long they spent in each heart rate zone and how many calories they burned.
When testing these prototypes, you might focus on one key objective: to determine whether or not the new feature is intuitive and easy to use. To measure this, you might time how long it takes for your users (or test participants) to locate the new feature, as well as how long it takes them to complete the action of tracking a new workout.
You might also ask specific questions to gather relevant user feedback, such as “How easy was it to find the new feature?” and “How did you feel while interacting with this new feature?”
Prototype (and test) early and often
Don’t wait until an idea is well-formed before you prototype and test it. The whole point of design thinking is to prototype and test early and often — to gather vital feedback before you invest too much time and energy into a single solution.
Also, you shouldn’t be prototyping and testing your ideas just once. Prototype and test your initial ideas, refine them (or come up with entirely new ideas) based on what you learn, then prototype and test those new ideas or iterations, and so on.
By continuously prototyping and testing, you can progressively work towards the most effective, user-friendly solution. This reduces the risk of costly redesigns after the product has been developed and launched.
Test your prototypes on a diverse audience
It’s important to make sure that you’re not just putting your prototypes in front of people who can validate your ideas or tell you what you want to hear.
Test your prototypes on a diverse audience — including stakeholders and users who have existing knowledge of the product, as well as those who have no expectations whatsoever as to how the product should work.
Different users will approach your product or solution with different needs, expectations, and perspectives, so diversity in testing is crucial for gathering a broad range of insights. And, of course, it also plays a critical role in designing products that are accessible and inclusive.
The takeaway
Prototyping is a crucial step in the design thinking process, allowing you to visualize and test your ideas before developing them. This ensures that you’re focusing on the right solutions to your users’ problems, and designing them in a way that resonates with your target audience.
Without prototyping and testing, you run the risk of creating products that don’t actually address a real user need — or products that require extensive (and expensive) redesigns after they’ve been launched. Not only is that bad for the user experience; it costs unnecessary time, money, and resources.
So, prototype early and often to explore, validate, and refine your ideas, and create truly user-centric products that your audience will love. If you’d like to learn more about design thinking, check out these additional guides:
- 7 Examples of Design Thinking in Practice (And What We Can Learn From Them)
- 18 Design Thinking Books Everyone Should Read
- The 10 Best Design Thinking Courses and Certifications To Take in 2024
Next Steps
If you are interested in learning more about prototypes in design thinking, we highly recommend checking out this UX Design project by AND learner Abhishekh Singh. For further information, here are some additional resources you can refer to:
- Watch this session by Shiva Viswanathan, Design Head of Ogilvy Pennywise, and Naman Singh, Product Experience Designer at RED.
- Talk to a course advisor to discuss how you can transform your career with one of our courses.
- Pursue our UI UX Design courses - all courses are taught through live, interactive classes by industry experts, and some even offer a Job Guarantee.
- Take advantage of our scholarship and funding options to overcome any financial hurdle on the path of your career transformation.
Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.
