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需要prototyping原因

1. Prototypes 令出來的design更好
文章中提及apple 都有利用prototype

It is no coincidence that Apple, a company with a significant commitment to design, is also renowned for its reliance on prototyping. According to Leander Kahney, a journalist who has followed Apple closely:

“It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes time and money. Apple will do a hundred—that’s how many they did of the MacBook. Steve Jobs doesn’t wake up one morning and there’s a vision of an iPhone floating in front of his face. He and his team discovered it through this exhaustive process of building prototype after prototype.” (See iPhone pre-launch: Looking “Inside Steve’s Brain”.)

Another important benefit is that prototyping helps designers fail faster. It is rarely the case that the first answer that occurs to someone is really the best solution.

2. Prototypes 促進溝通

chowky 十分認同!除非有了實在的prototype，否則其他users 不擅於由幾幅圖畫去幻想interaction．

Interaction design is about much more than just having good ideas—it’s about expressing a vision, working with people to chart a path forward, and then ultimately executing on that vision. This means that designers have to convey the ideas in their heads to others. One of the most challenging things about this is the fact that while designers are quite skilled at inferring the behaviors of a whole system from a few flat images of a user interface, most other people are not.

“Many clients will have difficulty understanding a design until they see and use the prototype. Like all the other models and diagrams, it is a tool for communicating. Prototypes communicate the message, ‘this is what it could be like’.” (Dan Saffer, Designing for Interaction, p. 114.)

３．　Prototypes 令ｕｓｅrs可以親身試驗，使ｕｓｅｒ可以評價輸入方式和可用性

Others, including myself, find user feedback to be most useful when people are responding to something that looks and acts like a finished product.

４．　Prototypes help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time

Although this kind of prototyping can start to bleed into a technical proof of concept, this isn’t always a bad thing. It’s not just about figuring out the hypothetically ideal experience for your user audience, but more importantly, it’s about figuring out the ideal experience that can actually be delivered to that audience, given a certain technical environment and development timeline.

Delivering technically infeasible designs to your development team is the equivalent to giving someone driving directions to a dead end. They are pretty much guaranteed to be late, if they arrive at all. First they will try to build what you’ve delivered, discover the impasse, and then be forced to find a new route. This adds significant time to what is already likely to be an aggressive development timeline.

If you’ve designed hundreds of web applications and you’re not pushing the envelope in terms of interaction idioms, you probably have a pretty good idea about what is and what is not technically possible. In this case, prototyping may not be necessary.

對於新的ｔｅｃｈｎｏｌｏｇｙ，最好都是先造一個ｐｒｏｏｆ-of-concept的prototype，否則，非常困難evaluate time frame.

However, if you’re working in a new technology, or trying to invent input or display mechanisms, building a proof-of-concept prototype can be a very wise move, especially if the development team would also benefit from the creation of a prototype.

常用的prototying 方法
1. Storyboarded scenarios
2. Paper prototypes (and crude physical models)
3. Clickable prototypes

Source: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/cooper_prototyping.html