Rapid prototyping the fastest way to get to the core of a good application: usability.
You can’t build it until you know what it is. Rapid prototyping, sometimes known as design prototyping, is an often overlooked, but critical, component of good software development. It allows your team and your stakeholders to have a crystal-clear sense of what you are building because, unlike text, visual communication transcends all language and cultural barriers. For this reason, Crowd Interactive rarely takes on a project without first building a rapid prototype.
Rapid Prototyping is simple
Rapid prototyping fully defines the look and feel of your application without making it talk to the database. It depicts your application’s branding, features, and requirements. The average prototypes don’t require more than 10 different pages or views. Our work in design prototyping is clickable, simulating a real interaction of the application. Instead of using real data and database connectivity, the rapid prototype utilizes dummy data.
A rapid prototype is a partial rendering of your web application. It depicts your application’s branding, features, and requirements. The average rapid prototype is ten pages long. The menu bar can be used to navigate the site and features can be clicked. The rapid prototype does not link to a real database, but it does display dummy data.
Rapid prototyping saves time and money
While many people feel that rapid prototyping could be a distraction to their development project, it in fact allows them to move much more quickly. Why? Because evolution of thought comes from viewing the interface itself! You are able to make changes to the application when the cost of change is the lowest, before the database functionality is created. Further, this saves countless hours of writing out and explaining requirements. Design prototyping also lets developers more accurately estimate the time and cost involved in building the software. Rapid prototyping is always worth it.
Save time and money by providing your development team with exact requirements through a rapid prototype. This saves countless hours of writing out and explaining requirements. It also lets developers more accurately estimate the time and cost involved in building the software.
Rapid prototyping enables pre selling
A rapid prototype gets you 80% of the way there in 20% of the time. Most stakeholders such as investors, board members, and prospective clients want to know ‘what the application really is’ before they invest in it. The fastest way to show them that is through fully clickable design prototyping before the app is even build.
With rapid prototyping you can raise money from investors, win the buy-in from other stake holders, and sell services before the software is complete.
Rapid prototyping does not have to create waste
A truly agile workflow in rapid prototyping allows our time to build the application directly on-top of the rapid prototype. Because all of our rapid prototyping is in xHTML/CSS/JavaScript, you don’t have to worry about the rapid prototype getting thrown away. It’s already part of your application!
Rapid prototyping in four steps
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Discovery, 1 week. We learn about what you are trying to build and work with your designs, whether they are completed pages or sketches on napkins.
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Design, 2-3 weeks. We create from scratch or incorporate your existing designs. Either way, we give you the options you need.
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HTML programming, 1-3 weeks. We bring the still pages to life by enabling and linking every button and form.
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Deployment. Design prototyping is complete when it goes live on the servers of your choice.
An average rapid prototype cost under $15,000 and is generally comprised of under 20 screens. Crowd Interactive has deep expertise in rapid prototyping.
