Victor Conesa is Product Manager at Justinmind, where he uses his business, tech and UX experience to refine and promote Justinmind's interactive prototyping tool.
And as far as getting into software is concerned, it interested me because, in this industry, you get to build something from the ground up. When I was younger I considered a career in architecture, mainly for the same reason - the idea of creating something from nothing is compelling.
In the 5 intervening years I learned how to intuit the most important activity for the product in each moment - to keep an eye on the competition and business strategy, as well as on everyday user-centric stuff. That was an important change - starting to think about the strategic needs of the business. In fact, that's been the main difference between Product Manager and VP of Product Development for me: in the former you direct the team through day-to-day things, looking more at the user level; in Product Development you have to be more strategic and think about what's best for the business. You're involved completely in the direction and the health of the business, you're not just along for the ride.
The web development process is full of terms that can get a little mixed-up, at times, so I'll try to be as clear as possible. Wireframing is the act (and art!) of building a wireframe, a static representation of your eventual webpage or app. Wireframes tend to be low-fidelity, i.e. to bear only a general resemblance to the final product, acting as a skeletal map or frame for designers and developers to work with.
You can use wireframes to map out and test core functionality and navigation flows, content priority and element hierarchy. Wireframes are generally used earlier rather than later in the software development lifecycle, before moving on to a high-fidelity interactive prototype.
The great thing about wireframes is that they're quick to create and iterate upon, and allow you to focus on the big picture.
While you're right that launching a website and online business is now easier than ever in theory, the importance of having a strong digital strategy has increased in step with that. E-commerce and digital enterprise is hugely competitive - you can't just cross your fingers and hope for the best. A good digital business strategy is characterized by the incorporation of business models and processes that embrace and new digital and disruptive technologies. The main benefits of having a digital business strategy in place are multifarious: it promotes agility and efficiency, increases ROI and drives internal innovation. I would say that prototyping a digital solution helps you to define and refine your digital business strategy before actually rolling out your final product.
If we think about software development in linear terms for a moment (although of course it's more cyclical in reality), prototyping would be the next step beyond wireframing. A prototype is a mid-to-high fidelity model of your final website's user interface (UI). A prototype will be more detailed in terms of design, and is interactive: you can demonstrate and validate the total functionality of the design with events, variables, animations and advanced interactions.
Its strengths lie in the fact you can do user testing with real users on real devices, collaborate with colleagues on something tangible, and present your ideas faithfully to potential clients or stakeholders. Plus there's nothing like being able to see your final product in all its functional and visual glory without writing a line of code!
Figuring out user requirements - the user needs that should be built into functional and non-functional requirements - usually falls within the remit of the business analyst or the user experience professional on a project. Eliciting user requirements can be done in several ways - workshops, interviews, user testing, contextual observation etc - but the key premise is that the user voice has to be audible. An interactive prototype can be really useful for things like observation, when you watch how a typical user interacts with your product on a device.
The user requirements you collect are added to the wider requirements (these can all be kept in version histories in a prototyping tool) and will impact on future prototype iterations and, of course, your final product.
Interesting question! Wireframing and prototyping can be pivotal in devising a winning content strategy. Firstly, content-first design should be introduced during the design-prototyping stage of your web project: try composing content first and designing around it, you'll find that it streamlines scaling, communication and design harmony. Prioritizing content can help you define white space, layout and brand identity. Of course, this approach isn't right for every product - in our recent Justinmind website redesign for example, design had the final say at certain moments - but if a design/development team decides to pursue this avenue it can produce interesting results.
Firstly, it's worthwhile pointing out that the average IT project takes 230% longer to complete that originally planned, and costs 178% more than expected. These kind of stats can be really daunting for a small or mid-size business about to embark on digital transformation or a software project.
Wireframing and prototyping can reduce risks in several ways:
The thing is, on many projects everyone is invested in the final product and they all have different ideas about final outcomes and ways to get there. Things can get heated. Prototyping is a good way to align both the needs and the desires of the business and IT teams by validating business requirements and design decisions in a tangible manner. It also helps improve communication between teams, because everyone has access to the prototypes and the requirements in the same tool at the same time, wherever they are. And you can link visibly comments to features and functions, so there's less room for confusion. In the end, you validate and iterate with everyone on board.
Building products with outsourced developers can be a challenge; cases arise where coded software have to be entirely rewritten thanks to bad management or worse communication. But if you communicate with external teams through a prototype, or even collaborate with them within a prototyping tool, you remove the majority of the possibilities for confusion. Everyone can see comments and changes in real-time, wherever they are. This way of working promotes agile iteration cycles and really just shores up open communication between all kinds of teams.
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