Evolutionary Prototyping Service

The evolutionary prototyping cycle consists of three major steps:

• planning the prototype
• developing the prototype
• checking and evaluating the prototype

These steps are carried out for as many times as is necessary. 

When the customer and the development team are all happy with the level of the product, then this cycle can be broken and the solution can be deployed.

Evolutionary prototyping is focused on the most understandable aspects of the project, and should not be confused with rapid prototyping whereas rapid prototyping is focused on the least understandable aspects.

Evolutionary prototyping is often used when the requirements and must-haves are often not known beforehand. Thus, by being gradually changed over time, evolutionary prototyping delivering a useable, well-thought and tested solution.

Evolutionary prototyping requires a lot of creativity and fast reaction by the designer and developer teams. The process starts with the initial prototype and then progress is made after the initial feedbacks & reviews from the customer side. Then, following the initial feedbacks, the designer and developer teams produces consecutive prototypes with improvements in the functionality and the looks, up until they reach the final product through this process.

By nature, the team has to be creative and should be able to generate a lot of variations of what can be better for the product. Deciding on what to show the customer in the consecutive iterations is another task to deal with in this process. There will be a lot of trial and tests in functionalities and overal designs all along the way, but not all of it will be shown to the customer. The people in between the design and development side and the customer side should have good communication skills and they should be good at understanding the type of stuff that the customer will like, thus helping determine the direction of the process.

Delivering different versions of a prototype in a short amount of time will require the agency to have experience on the topic. It will be better if the agency has completed similar works previously, as this will help in delivering the desired solution. Handling the process does require controlled and well planned professionals. This kind of a task can be challenging to the inexperienced.

If the previous experience of an agency seems good enough, and they seem to be confident with the topics and the way they run the whole process, then there is no obstacle to proceed with them.

Companies that would like to have their products evolve by the inputs of their target audience can choose to get evolutionary prototyping services from Saypr. Getting this service from Saypr will definitely speed up the delivery of the product, and this solution will definitely meet the requirements of the users better, as they will be involved in the product’s evolution all along the design to production phases. This in turn will improve the engagement of the users with the product.

Smaller sized companies have relatively smaller budgets when compared to the large companies, so they do not have the luxury of getting a lot of changes done by trial and error after the product is released. Most of them have a single shot and they don’t want to fail, so they are usually interested in these kind of prototyping services. Evolutionary prototyping will enable them and their customers to have a say in the development of the product, and this method lets these people have an idea of how the end product will be even before it is released. This might seem like an early on investment but in fact it will cut down on costs in the long run, and prevent the back and forth fixes and iterations from taking place after the product is released. It is cheaper to have iterations on the design and the development phases where prices and the people affected from such changes are much less.

Large companies have a bit more freedom when it comes to budget, so they can be more relax on spending this money. This either has two meanings, they are either willing to spend more early on to get a detailed evolutionary prototype service from agencies such as Saypr, or they have the luxury to do a lot of trial and error fixes and iterations after the product is released. The latter one is not the best idea, as it will look bad in the eyes of the customers of the company. It will definitely look cheaper (although they will be spending much more money to get things re-done over and over again). 

For large companies that choose to proceed with a full scale evolutionary prototype, we usually specify target groups which will represent their target audience, and work with them in developing and improving the product. This is critical because the product should be understandable and liked by all sections of the target audience. The companies that use this technique in delivering products to their customers often end up using this method in all of their product development cases, as the final products will always be fit for purpose and will perform well.

The size of the project and the duration it will take us to deliver the final product will be the guiding factor in the cost. It all comes down to the requirements from our clients really. The number of iterations it will need to get the job done, and the quality of the feedback that comes from the initial users during the process is important and depending on how these goes, the duration and thus the price of the project is determined.