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3 rapid prototyping exercises to improve your UX skills
This one quote I read from Hustle, really stuck to me:
“Almost everybody I know who does interesting, creative work went through a phase of years of where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t good as they wanted it to be… It is only by going through a volume of work will you close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions” — Ira Glass
Every month I reflect on ‘How I can be a better Designer’. I learned through my background in visual arts that you can train yourself to draw better in a shorter period of time (literally).
I experimented with this in the Summer of 2013. My goal then was to achieve realistic sketches of eyes that captured human emotion. To do this I gave myself a 30-minute time limit and these were the results…
This technique can be applied to design as well — I found that great ideas don’t always require a lot of time. We want to reduce our own tendencies to overthink, agonize and get distracted from the problem in front of us.
What is Rapid Prototyping?
I like to describe rapid prototyping as not just wireframes.
- Wireframes are the skeletal structure of user interfaces. It shows the structure, layout, content and functionality of a page.
- Rapid Prototyping is part of the design process after you have a clear grasp of the problem and your users’ needs. At this stage, the designer thinks about what needs to be done to reach the end goal and goes through a series of quick iterations and feedback sessions that could potentially solve the problem.
What you see at the end of a rapid prototyping session are wireframes that you can use to demonstrate the idea but within these ‘wireframes’ are solutions.
I was once asked by a UX Designer ‘how I show my design thinking’. He found it…
