The prototyping process is an essential component of any product development strategy. Understanding exactly why the prototyping process is so important and what its primary purposes are will help you to devise a prototyping strategy that ticks all the boxes for your business.
Prototyping should always be a part of your product development cycle. The costs of producing a prototype before you begin an initial production run are more than offset by the money that you will save by avoiding potentially calamitous issues with an untested product.
Ensure You Have A Workable Process
The most basic reason to build a prototype of a product is to make sure that it works as intended. No amount of designing on paper is going to be able to tell you whether a product works as reliably as building a prototype facsimile of it. A prototype by nature is not supposed to be quite as high quality as the finished product.
However, producing a prototype should let you know whether the overall manufacturing process that you intend to use is suitable or not helping you identify issues with your manufacturing process early on.
Switching up a manufacturing process at the last minute can be difficult and expensive. Not to mention that it is a logistical nightmare at the best of times, but even more so under the current market conditions for manufacturers.
Get Useful Feedback Early in the Process
Getting feedback on your design ideas at every stage of the process is useful. However, there is a big difference between getting feedback on ideas when they are presented in an abstract sense and getting feedback on them when they have been integrated into a working prototype.
You may find that your audience warms to the suggestion of a particular feature or design idea when you are doing your market research, but is much less enthusiastic about it when they see it rendered in the flesh.
Learning this information as early on in the process as possible gives you time to respond, and helps to avoid a potentially expensive design overhaul. In most cases, it makes sense to develop a prototype iteratively.
This means doing small production runs of early prototypes and then scaling them up as you refine the design and move closer to a final product. Approaching your prototyping this way means that once you scale up production and start producing a relatively large number of prototypes, you will have a refined design that is less likely to contain any fatal errors.
Save Time and Money By Making Any Necessary Design Changes Early On
If you have to suddenly overhaul some or all of your design when you should be gearing up for your final product launch, then you are going to have to pull out all the stops in order to get the necessary work done in time. This will inevitably kick your costs up even higher and will require you to operate on a very tight turnaround time.
The further you are into the prototyping process, the more expensive it is going to be to fix any errors. Once you are out of prototyping and considering your initial production runs, you need to have your design finalized and confirmed. Proceeding with your initial production run without having first verified your design by prototyping it properly can be a very expensive mistake. Any potential gains you make in getting to market quicker will be wiped out if you have to pull your product from shelves to alter its design.
Give Usersan Accurate Facsimile of Your Product to Test
The more accurately a prototype represents the final product, the more useful it will be in providing you with feedback. If you want your initial users and testers to be able to provide you with the kind of feedback that you need to perfect your design, then you need to provide them with an accurate facsimile of what the real product will feel like.
User feedback is essential to the product development process. The longer your team spends developing a product and refining its design, the more likely they are to start experiencing tunnel vision.
Sometimes, it pays to have an outside pair of eyes, a fresh set of eyes with no pre-existing attachments to the project, to tell you what is and is not working. But if the prototype that they use to test your product is not up to standard, then it is going to limit the usefulness of their feedback.
You Can Start with a Low-Fi Version
The best way of approaching your prototyping is as an iterative process. This means that you build successive versions of your prototype and refine your design and approach between each one. You can start out with a very lo-fi prototype, depending on the nature of your product. A low-fi prototype could be as simple as a paper sketch that shows the products and highlights their key features.
As long as this conveys to your users and designers what the key features are, and what the product will look like, you can begin to get useful feedback. Once you have refined your lo-fi paper version, you can then move on to building a working prototype.
Pick Your Approach Carefully
There are a number of different ways that you can approach the prototyping process. The best one will depend on which stage of the process you are at and what kind of product you are prototyping.
For example, CNC machining is a popular automated manufacturing process that many businesses are turning to in order to produce high-quality prototypes at scale. Not only is CNC a cost-efficient manufacturing technique to use but it is also one of the more versatile techniques available.
For example, businesses like Rapid Direct offer custom CNC machining services in China. Manufacturing in China usually offers excellent value for international businesses, but taking advantage of CNC machining in China through manufacturers like Rapid Direct multiplies the value even further.
With a CNC milling service on offer, Rapid Direct’sprecision CNC machining is ideal for prototype machining. You should consider custom CNC machining for producing your prototypes in a cost-efficient way.
Getting your prototyping process right is essential for a smooth and successful product launch. Your prototyping will alert you to any shortcomings in your product’s design and will give you the opportunity to address them before your product gets anywhere near the retailer’s shelves.
But prototyping the right way is not as easy as many people assume. If you try to skip straight from a rough idea to a working prototype, you will run into a plethora of issues. On the other hand, if you are able to work on your prototype iteratively and gradually build upon your initial design, you can weed out issues easily.
Your initial prototypes don’t have to be anything more complicated than paper sketches and diagrams that show the concept of your product.
You can then work with all the relevant designers and other staff members involved in developing your product to refine your design before you begin manufacturing working prototypes. In taking this approach, you will minimize your costs and maximize your efficiency.
