Prototyping is a process of creating mockups or simulations of your layout designs before developing them into final products. Prototyping can help you test your layout designs for usability, functionality, aesthetics, and user feedback. In this article, you will learn how to use prototyping to test your layout designs in different stages and with different tools.
Prototyping your layout designs can help you save time, money, and resources by avoiding costly mistakes and rework, as well as communicate your design ideas more effectively to clients, stakeholders, and team members. This process can validate design assumptions and hypotheses, identify and solve potential problems and errors, incorporate user feedback and suggestions, improve design quality and user satisfaction, and showcase design skills and creativity.
Prototyping is very important with print layouts. On the computer screen it's difficult to judge text sizes. You need to check them in 100%. You need to check large format prints. It's not necessary to always prototype the full size layout for that, but at least the critical parts.
Prototyping your layout designs can be done in different stages, depending on your design goals, budget, and timeline. The level of fidelity, or how realistic and detailed your prototypes are, can vary to test the designs in different stages. Sketching is the lowest level of fidelity where you draw quick and rough sketches of the layout designs with paper and pencil. This is a great way to brainstorm ideas and generate multiple design concepts. Wireframing is a low to medium level of fidelity where digital tools are used to create basic and schematic representations of the layout designs. This is useful for defining, organizing, and structuring elements like content, navigation, and functionality. Mockup is a medium to high level of fidelity where digital tools are used to create realistic and detailed representations of the layout designs. This is the stage for refining, polishing, and styling elements such as colors, fonts, images, and icons. Prototype is the highest level of fidelity where digital tools are used to create interactive and functional simulations of the layout designs. This stage is ideal for testing, evaluating, and demonstrating interactions, animations, transitions, and feedback.
Critical parts can be prototyped by just printing out that part. With packagings it can be important to print out the dieline to check it. Or to figure out its logic and where the design needs to match on the sides.
There are many tools available for prototyping your layout designs, from simple and free to complex and paid. Adobe XD is a powerful and versatile tool, allowing you to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes of your layout designs. It also facilitates collaboration with team members, sharing with clients, and testing on different devices. Figma is a cloud-based and collaborative tool for creating wireframes, mockups, and prototypes of your layout designs. It also allows you to edit and comment on your prototypes with team members, export to different formats, and integrate with other tools. Balsamiq is a simple and easy-to-use tool for creating wireframes of your layout designs. You can drag and drop elements, add annotations and notes, and export wireframes to PDF or PNG. InVision is a comprehensive and professional tool for creating mockups and prototypes of your layout designs. It enables adding interactivity and animations to prototypes, collecting feedback from clients, and syncing with other tools.
Testing your layout designs with prototyping is an essential step to ensure your design meets user needs and expectations. This process can help you verify functionality and usability, measure performance and efficiency, evaluate aesthetics and appeal, as well as gather user feedback and insights. To do this, you can use user testing, heuristic evaluation, and A/B testing. User testing involves observing and interviewing users while they interact with your prototype to understand how they use, feel, and think about your design. Heuristic evaluation evaluates your design against predefined principles or guidelines to identify any design issues or violations that may affect the user experience. A/B testing compares two or more versions of your design to measure which one performs better in terms of user behavior. Ultimately, these testing methods can help you iterate and improve your design solutions while optimizing it for user goals and preferences.
Collaborating on your layout designs with prototyping is a key factor to achieve successful design outcomes and deliverables. This can help you align your design vision with clients and stakeholders, communicate ideas with team members, share feedback and suggestions with peers and mentors, and showcase work and progress with your audience and users. To collaborate on your layout designs, you can use tools such as Slack, Miro, and Dribbble. Slack is a popular tool that allows you to chat and communicate with team members, clients, and stakeholders. Miro is a collaborative tool that allows you to create interactive boards for design ideas. Dribbble is a social platform for showcasing design work and getting feedback from users.