Prototyping
Prototyping is the process of creating an interactive, clickable model of a website or application that simulates user interactions, used for testing and validation before development begins.
Prototyping creates a simulation of the final product that users can interact with. Unlike a static wireframe or design mockup, a prototype is clickable: you can tap buttons, navigate between screens, fill in forms, and experience the flow of the product, even though there's no real code or data behind it.
Tools like Figma, InVision, and Framer allow designers to create clickable prototypes from their designs with transitions, animations, and conditional logic. The primary purpose of prototyping is to test and validate the user experience before investing in development.
In practice
- A bank prototyped their new mobile banking experience and discovered through user testing that customers couldn't find the bill pay feature; moving it to the main navigation before development saved an estimated 200 hours of rework
- A SaaS company used Figma prototypes to test two different onboarding flows with 20 users, clearly identifying which approach led to faster task completion
- An e-commerce company prototyped their redesigned checkout process and tested it with 15 users, finding that 8 of them got confused at step 3, leading to a redesign that improved checkout completion by 25%
- A healthcare app team used prototypes to get regulatory feedback on their patient interface before writing any code, avoiding a potential 6-month delay from post-development compliance changes
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.