Creating mobile applications is a great stride, particularly for companies that have never been involved in app development. They involve high uncertainty levels and may be pretty expensive, a combination that is not attractive for business.
For those lacking in experience, developing mobile applications often becomes bloated, and the venture ends up exceeding the projected budget. A result that often disappoints both the business owners and the developers.
Cutting corners often results in grave mistakes such as inadequate security, crashes, and poorly developed user interfaces.
The solution to these problems is building a prototype before the actual mobile application. An application prototype is a demo program that shows the functionality, design, and user flow of an application. Here are four benefits of creating an application prototype.
1. Researching New Ideas and Determining Product Improvements
Prototyping a mobile app helps you validate an early concept and gives you a chance to explore new ideas in the early stages of the development process. As you prototype the design process, you can carry out user testing to help you determine possible improvements you can make before completing the product.
You can continue improving the prototype until your mobile app becomes marketable and achieves your business goals. You can use an app design software to help you in your prototyping venture.
2. Improved Collaboration
Prototypes help your team collaborate efficiently and work faster. You can tweak your product faster because all the work is being done in the design phase rather than during development. You can roll out versions of the prototype several times in a week, and your clients can access several rounds of changes until you perfect the app.
Continuous collaboration between the developers, UX designers, and the product owners helps ensure that the solution recommended in the prototype works for all the parties when your project reaches the development phase.
3. Funding
Before investing in a prototype, stakeholders must ensure that the investment will add profit to the organization.
Thus, prototyping the application helps eliminate uncertainties and shows how the final product will function. It also offers investors lots of data and other metrics that will help assess their investment.
4. Cost-Effective
Although it is not always cheaper to create a prototype before building the actual application, inefficiencies can be very costly when dealing with a team of talented and expensive developers.
So you need to know what you’re building and the problems you intend to solve before commencing. The feedback you receive and the iterations you create will help you reach the perfect solution quickly.
This helps simplify the design process and makes it affordable during prototyping. However, if you build an application and discover that it does not meet the intended requirements and needs to be rebuilt, it can be costly.
Even if you have to gather several rounds of feedback for your prototype, the final product will be a lot cheaper than if you have to incur unexpected changes during development. Thus, the prototyping phase helps you eliminate most mistakes, making your development process faster while helping you stick to the budget.
Although creating an interactive prototype of an application involves some cost, its benefits far outweigh the cost. It will help your team collaborate better, and the final product will be much cheaper.