Meta description: Establishing a team’s prototyping workflow can include a lot of trial and error. Save your team time by following these four tips to improve efficiency and success.
Knowing how to build your team’s prototyping workflow can make your production more efficient by helping you reach milestones and avoiding common mistakes that stall progress. If you have trouble managing your team’s workflow process, the following four tips can help.
Keep in mind that each team has its own barriers, though. Some of these recommendations may apply to your process more than others.
Make a Kanban Board to Focus on Tasks
Kanban boards let you create a visual framework for your workflow. You can make Kanban boards with apps, or you can take a low-tech by attaching multi-colored stickers to a wall or whiteboard.
Some of the benefits that your team gets from Kanban boards include:
- Assigning specific tasks to teams or individual team members.
- Moving stickers to show that a task has been accomplished.
- Using color to put tasks into categories like “wireframing,” “icon development,” and “prototyping.”
If the Kanban approach doesn’t work well for your group, look into Agile and Scrum management methodologies. You might find that one of them suits your team better than Kanban.
Draw Wireframes Before Investing Time in Prototypes
Your team will likely develop a lot of ideas that get thrown in the garbage instead of sent to the next designer. That’s how the creative process works.
Start your team’s prototyping workflow by making wireframes that define:
- The layout of each page.
- How users will launch features.
- Where different sections will appear on the page.
- How users can navigate to other parts of the app or website.
- Interactions between users and the product.
More likely than not, you will find that one wireframe meets your project’s needs better than others. If you have several good examples, you can combine the best elements of each. Before you move to the prototyping stage, it makes sense to take a vote and decide which wireframe the team wants to follow. You can always make adjustments, but the chosen wireframe will provide a loose blueprint for your product.
Create a Design System for Approved Assets
Few things matter more than establishing a design system at the beginning of your project. Design systems give designers access to all of the assets approved for a project. Since they only have access to approved assets, designers can’t deviate from the product’s overall aesthetic or goal.
A good design system should include approved:
- Color palettes
- Icons
- Photos
- Page templates
- Graphics
- Interactions
- Text options, including sizes and typefaces
- Patterns
- Branding images
When designers feel confused about how to complete tasks, they can often find their answers in the design system. Everyone’s workflow becomes simpler because they can focus on finishing their designs instead of answering someone else’s questions.
Establishing a design system will also improve the workflow of future projects. If you create a product for the same company, you can use the existing design system to improve brand recognition and product adoption. Even if you need to make products for new clients, you can use the experience you gain making design systems to create a more efficient workflow for the new jobs.
Choose a Prototyping Tool That Makes Your Team More Efficient
You have plenty of prototyping tools to consider. Some of them work better than others. In fact, some of them will streamline your prototyping workflow to help you meet milestones sooner and show updates to your clients.
UXPin prototyping tools eliminate unnecessary steps to improve your workflow. Some of the best things about UXPin is that it:
- Includes designing and prototyping tools.
- Uses real data for prototype interactions.
- Lets you share prototypes with anyone, even if they don’t have a UXPin account.
- Makes it easy to create system designs and UI libraries.
- Offers real-time collaboration between colleagues (similar to Google Docs).
Do your team a favor by getting a free UXPin trial. You will likely find that it helps improve your prototyping workflow. If it doesn’t, then you don’t risk anything. You can just go back to using other tools.
Conclusion
Improving prototyping workflow can lead to several benefits. You can use your efficient approach to make and sell more products, including website and app designs. If you want to lower your production costs, you can use improved efficiency to keep your design team as small as possible.
You have so many options. You cannot, however, jump into a prototyping project without a plan. That approach will waste time, create errors, and annoy employees. You might even lose clients when you fail to reach milestones or miss deadlines.
Even if you don’t follow this advice, know that you must take a strategic approach to prototyping. Anything else will lead to failure.
