At Big Spaceship, we have weekly show-and-tells where either a staff member presents a current project or a guest speaker talks about a topic that relates to their specialization. A few weeks ago, Todd Zaki Warfel, author of Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Principal Designer at Messagefirst gave a fascinating presentation on the value and practice of prototyping to our team. In his book, Todd writes, “Prototyping helps you get ideas out of your head and into something more tangible—something you can experience, work through, play with, and test.”

After the presentation we had the opportunity to put theory into practice. We were divided into small groups and given five minutes to create an iPhone photo app prototype using note cards, transparencies, markers, scissors and tape. It was interesting to use physical objects instead of a computer to express our ideas. Also, having a short time frame meant we didn’t have to time to dwell on creating the perfect prototype.

After the show-and-tell, we sat down with Todd to chat with him about he got started, why prototyping is important and how might we use prototyping in our work.

How did you get started in prototyping?

I started in art school because I always liked to tinker with my hands. My grandfather was a wood worker, so I would just sit in the shop and watch him make stuff. I guess I just like to do something with my hands. Somewhere along the way, someone asked me to teach a paper prototyping workshop. We had played with paper a little in the shop, so I thought I could do that. Ever since then I’ve tried to make it more and more of our process.

How do you convince the client of the value of prototyping?

There are two areas in the design process that clients typically see as costs: one is research and one is prototyping. They’ll say, “Researchers? You guys are designers, aren’t you supposed to know this stuff? Why are you guys going to do research that’s going to cost me like $30,000, $40,000, $80,000 or $100,000 – what am I going to get for it? You couldn’t read some articles online and figure it out?” The other one is prototyping. Clients basically see it as a cost because they think it’s just going to add time to the development process.

What they don’t see is the savings that comes from the back end. On the research side of things, we typically find an additional number of revenue opportunities that we never would have without research, so that one is pretty easy to justify. On the prototyping aspect, whatever time we spend on prototyping we typically save them three to four fold on the backend. If we’re prototyping, we’re making a lot of mistakes in the prototype that won’t happen in production, which means a lot less re-work and QA. We can avoid all that by making those mistakes in a low-cost environment. The other big value we found is that clients get to see something and play with it much faster.

What is the advantage of prototyping over mockups and wireframes?

When you’re using static stuff, like photoshop mockups and wireframes, all the design is theoretical, and you’re going to have to make a huge argument about which one is going to work or not. But when you get clients to play around with it, you actually get to show them the back of it.

Fred Beecher says prototyping gives him the freedom to fail and not be worried about it. Because when you use these quick rapid cycles like we use, I’m only going invest a little bit of time to see if something’s going to work or not. If I sketch it out on paper, then pitch it to my peers and they critique it, I’ve invested a few minutes and I’ll know really quickly which of the concepts is worth pursuing. I go pursue that, spend a couple of days on it, show it to the client, and then go through that cycle with the client. Since we know there’s going to be low risk and low effort, we’re more likely to take some risks and try some stuff we wouldn’t normally try. For us this has led to an increase in the innovations we’ve tried. The client feels more comfortable with that because if it does blow, it’s only three to four days out and we’ll get it fixed.

How do you think strategists could apply prototyping to pitch work?

You guys could come up with two different approaches. One of the methods we use is called the “burrito lunch.” Get some guys in the office and say, hey we’ll buy you some burritos, there’s something we want to put past you. It might cost you $15-$20. You pitch your two concepts like they’re the clients. It’s a simulation – this is your sketch – your prototype that you’re going to pitch. Say to your coworkers, “First off, here are the goals that the clients said they want, we have two approaches.” Then you let your peers critique based on the goals. At least going through the process, you’re doing a test run before it goes to the client. It’s still the same model – you’re just designing a strategy versus a visual designer, an action.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we really time box stuff. So sketching stuff, we get 5-7 minutes to come up with something. You’d probably spend more time on that than on strategy. For the whole pitch critique process, we would use three minutes to pitch, two to critique. The reason we use these tight time boxes is that it keeps the conversation fairly focused.

Video by Jim Babb – @jimbabb