How can you use UI prototypes to gather feedback from stakeholders and team members?

Before starting on UI prototype, define clear goal about the project (eg: Increase engagement of X feature or Improve visual appeal, etc) including defined user persona by identifying the target audience to empathize their needs better. Having a well defined goals provide a benchmark for success

Using UI prototypes is an effective way to gather feedback from stakeholders and team members during the design process. This can be implemented in design tools like Figma or Adobe XD. Starting with defining key scenarios and objectives, selecting stakeholders for usability testing, and collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Conduct feedback sessions, and ask open-ended questions. Document and prioritize feedback, iterate the design, and repeat the process. This collaborative, iterative approach ensures the UI aligns with user and stakeholder expectations. It also ensures that user testing stages don't eat up your finances.

My advice is to start by pinpointing the core purpose of your prototype. Is it to gather user feedback, align with stakeholders, or collaborate with your team? Understanding this will shape your approach to the prototype's design and functionality.

Start early with low fidelity and low interactivity to quickly explore ideas and involve stakeholders in the early design process. As you refine designs based on feedback from all the stakeholders, move to medium fidelity and in the final stage when you want to test your prototype with your customer or client, create high fidelity prototype for real user feedback. Always have flexibility to switch between right level of fidelity at any given moment based on available resource like time, cost, end users, etc.

Be inclusive with all the members and limitations. Understand the skatehoalder limitation and provide the right guidance. Train all the co-workers to be inclusive and patience.

Today there are various options to create UI prototypes. Choose what you are most comfortable with. Just make sure you choose the right fidelity level and interactive level for the target audiences. From my personal experience, I recommend using Figma for design and prototypes as well. If you are a pure research person then feel free to use common or widely used tools like google slides as well for the low fidelity to test or explore basic functionality or ideas.

Schedule regular design critiques to collect feedback from cross functional team. This will help to effectively iterate the design and helps clarifying the context very well. Apart from internal feedback seeking sessions, conduct workshop, surveys, user interviews to gather feedback from end users. Be a active listener and take notes while facilitating such sessions.

Don't be coy and request feedback even between the project's main stages. Sometimes important information can get lost and forgotten in the initial brief. Regular input about progress or design choices will eliminate time-consuming modifications along the way.

Present and analyse these feedback to all the stakeholders to incorporate them into the final mocks. If there are lot of valuable feedbacks, then organise, prioritise them as collaborative exercise with the stakeholders. Dont forget to test the updated prototype again for one final feedback session with internal team.