Create a Prototype of Your Digital Product with our Step-by-Step Guide

Products are built iteratively — through a series of mini-cycles where specific functionalities are created or improved. This process should be user-centric, but early-stage founders often build initial product versions based solely on their own experiences. Creating and testing prototypes helps uncover gaps between how you envision the product and how potential users perceive it. This allows you to focus on priority features and highlight the product’s value to users. Additionally, testing with prototypes helps establish a unique selling proposition (USP) and validate both business and user hypotheses.

When building a prototype, it’s essential to embrace a User-Centered Design Mindset, creating products for a broad audience rather than just for yourself 🙂 This involves focusing on user needs at every stage—understanding the context, defining requirements, creating solutions, and testing them.

How Prototypes Differ from MVPs

An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a simplified version of a product designed to meet initial market needs. Its main purposes are to:

• For real users.
• To gather feedback on market demand.
• Ready to solve primary user needs and for commercial use.

A prototype is a model used to demonstrate specific concepts or features of a product. Its primary goals are to:

• For internal testing and feedback.
• Not suitable for commercial use.
• Limited to showcasing one or a few key features.

In this guide, we will explore three types of prototypes for digital products: lo-fi, mid-fi, and hi-fi. To choose the appropriate type of prototype, you should focus on two things:

• The goal of prototype testing;
• The target audience for prototype testing.

Static mockups help test how the product looks, clickable prototypes demonstrate user interaction with the product, and functional prototypes test specific features.

Low fidelity (lo-fi) prototype

A lo-fi prototype is essential for quickly and affordably visualizing your product concept. It helps you better explain your ideas and identify issues and areas for improvement that might not have been visible before.

The faster you create this prototype, the better. The timeline for creating a lo-fi prototype depends on the complexity of the product, but a general guide is:

• Ideation (1 week)
• Wireframe creation (1-2 weeks)
• Prototyping (1 week)
• Testing (1-2 weeks)

Medium fidelity (mid-fi) prototype

A mid-fi prototype is used to test user flows and gather feedback from users. With a more detailed picture at this stage, you can review the information architecture and potentially optimize some user paths. Creating this prototype takes more time because it is closer to what the final product will look like.

High fidelity (hi-fi) prototype

A hi-fi prototype is essential for usability testing and final product checks before launching the MVP.

Hi-fi prototypes are more expensive to create because they feature the final user interface design and complete user flows. This type of prototype serves as the foundation for your MVP.

1. Define Your Goals

Before starting the development of your prototype, it’s crucial to understand why you are creating it. Clearly articulate these goals and develop specific metrics to measure them so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts at the end. This also provides a rationale for your decisions.

Example: “I want to find out if users can locate an educational course through my app in less than three minutes.”

It’s essential to clearly define the target audience for your product before creating the prototype. This will simplify the testing of your idea and provide data that will be useful to your team. You can base this on the Value Proposition Canvas (read more here or in the book “Value Proposition Design”).

2. Identify Key Assumptions

The next step is to identify your key assumptions—the hypotheses you make about your customers, their problems, your solution, and your business model. You should list all your assumptions and rank them by their importance. Here’s an example of a hypothesis:

“Our target customers have busy schedules but want to stay in shape. They are willing to pay $10 per month for our app, which provides personalized workout and nutrition plans. We can reach these customers through social media advertising.”

3. Select Key Features

The next step is to identify which features of the product are the most important (i.e., those that provide the greatest value to customers and help them achieve their goals). Use a ranking system from 1 to 5 to evaluate the importance and resource allocation, focusing on features with high importance ratings for the customer. This approach will help you iterate faster, turning your prototype into an effective tool for testing your hypotheses.

4. Sketches and Wireframes

To simplify the creation of your prototype, start by sketching and structuring your ideas. This allows you to quickly explore concepts, layouts, and elements with minimal effort.

5. Creating the Prototype

If you are already familiar with Figma and understand the basic principles of using it, feel free to skip ahead. If not, we’ve prepared a step-by-step guide for using Figma to create your prototype. Here’s what you need to do:

Open Figma in the web version or download the application on your computer.
Create your account.
Follow this link: Figma Prototyping Guide

Here you will find a presentation on prototyping, an example of a digital product prototype, and a workspace illustrating most of the steps you need to take to create your own prototype.

For Hypothesis Testing:

Just as you need to define the main goals when creating a prototype, you should also understand which hypotheses you want to validate during testing. For example: testing a feature or the overall product experience.

You can also expand the scope of testing to explore how a specific segment of users perceives your product concept. It’s important to test the product with your target users, as selecting an irrelevant audience can result in invalid data, potentially steering your product in the wrong direction.

For Fundraising:

When you present an investor with a product idea solely through a PowerPoint presentation, you risk miscommunication. Why? Upon receiving basic information about the project concept, the investor makes assumptions about its appearance and functions based on their own experiences and biases. Your task during the presentation is to clearly convey your vision of the product to the investor.

A prototype helps enhance the perception of your idea and allows you to gauge reactions to it and your startup as a whole. By using a prototype, you demonstrate that you understand how to develop the product based on real data and what users need.

Your key goal during fundraising should be to reflect the product’s value proposition in solving the problem compared to other competitors.

Many founders use ready-made design systems to create their products. Here’s why this can be a good idea for you:

• Using a design system significantly reduces the time needed to create visuals.
• It allows you to shift focus from the visual aspects to enhancing the user experience.
• It simplifies the process of further technological development of the product.

Here is an example of a design system.

How we created a whole auction app for FRNZY in just 30 days? 

Using prototypes for pitching allows you to:

• Convince investors of the viability of your idea and gain their trust
• Demonstrate market reaction based on user feedback
• Clearly explain your concept