The Value of Prototyping for CX

Customers have high expectations of digital experiences. To survive in today's "Experience Economy" customer focus is key. However, many organisations still face challenges building immersive digital experiences. How does this impact the daily work of CX professionals?

In this article I want to highlight the benefits of prototyping for CX professionals. How does prototyping help CX professionals develop great customer experiences and save time?

THE CHALLENGE

In general the development process of new products or solutions consists of four phases:

1. Prototype;
2. Minimum Viable Product (MVP);
3. Product;
4. Product Variations.

Immediately investing a lot of time building out a solution represents huge risks for the level of solution fit. Additionally, it impacts the bottomline of organisations. This is where prototyping is paramount and provides major benefits. Prototypes allow CX professionals to quickly create simulations of a customer experience, collect feedback, identify gaps, reiterate and manage expectations while keeping control of time.

THE BENEFITS OF PROTOTYPING

Important benefits of prototyping:

• Create simulations of customer experiences without directly investing a huge amount of time;
• Validate the attributes, capabilities and differentiators of the solution with your customer;
• Discover gaps and opportunities;
• Build a relation with key stakeholders and manage expectations.

EXAMPLES OF PROTOTYPES

Prototypes can range from very simple paper prototypes to very complex solutions almost ready to move to the MVP phase. Below some examples:

Paper prototypes

This is an example of a prototype on paper, simulating possible experiences for a new mobile app. Although it seems very simple, a paper prototype is very powerful and allows you to focus on the customer and business context.

Functional prototypes

Functional prototypes are simulations that are very close to the actual solution. They are almost fully functional and quite often used for testing purposes. The purpose of these prototypes is testing the functions of the actual solution instead of the user experience.

Display prototypes

Display prototypes are intended to test the user experience or look and feel of a solution, like a website or a storefront.

TOOLS FOR PROTOTYPING

A couple of years ago I bought an expensive Canon DSLR to take great pictures of my kids. I took a course to learn more about the camera and one of the quotes of the professional photographer was:

It's the photographer that makes great pictures, not the camera.

This applies to prototyping as well. You will make the difference, not the tool that you use. The objective of a prototype is, to have a discussion and understand challenges, context and how a new solution should look like. That said, there are some great tools on the market that help you drive that iterative process and create beautiful prototypes. Below some of the tools that I have used in the past or still use today.

InVision

InVision is well known for prototyping and has a lot of integrations with other tools and platforms, like Sketch for example. It's a great tool to quickly create user experiences and use your designs from Sketch.

Marvelapp

MarvelApp is a great tool to build experiences for mobile. The prototype can be downloaded to a phone and saved on the homescreen, so that is has an app-like look and feel. It also integrates with Sketch and lets you sync your Sketch designs with MarvelApp. It's very easy to learn and runs in the cloud.

Adobe XD

Adobe XD is comparable to MarvelApp. It's easy to learn, focuses on mobile experiences. Part of Adobe's Creative Suite it has good integrations with Adobe's other apps like Photoshop.

Sketch

Sketch is one of my favourite applications creating crisp designs in a short timeframe. There are a lot of good libraries available on the internet. It is very intuitive and integrates with a lot of tools like MarvelApp, Axure, Adobe XD, etc.. The only "downside" is, that Sketch only works on MacOS.

Axure RP

Together with Sketch my personal favourite; Axure RP. Axure is a "heavy weight" in prototyping with some very strong capabilities. What I like about Axure is that it allows you to create a real web-like experience and apply rule-based behaviour. Logging in with credentials, personalise the content of webpages, passing variables between webpages and using animations are some examples. Axure has good integrations with workflow tooling as well and is really aimed at UX professionals and developments teams.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Customers have high expectations of their digital interactions with organisations. Today a business's customer experiences have become a huge differentiator. This impacts how CX professionals develop new products, services and solutions. As customer experiences are constantly changing, development has evolved and is no longer a linear process. Prototypes allow CX professionals to quickly create simulations of a customer experience and save time, validate the results, discover the business value and build relations.

Create. Validate. Discover. Build.

Sources:

• IDC Futurescape Worldwide Digital Transformation 2019 Predictions
• MIT, The economies and dimensionality of prototyping: value, time, cost and fidelity 
• Pictures: Unsplash.com