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Emmet Keeffe, iRise CEO and Co-founder, had an opinion piece published this week in SandHill.com. SandHill.com is the premier destination online destination for strategic information on the software business. The site and its newsletters are read by thousands of top software industry executives every week.
Emmet talks about “The Requirement Challenge” and why ”Accurate Specs are Key”. He finishes with “The Benefits of Visualization” which I am paraphrasing below:
- Business people can fully experience the product and make changes early in the process, saving significant time and downstream costs.
- Developers can catch design and functional errors before an application goes into production.
- The process can speed through multiple rounds of functional visual edits to quickly reach decisions on business needs and customer experience.
- Managers can increase final adoption of system with upfront agreements of the application’s process flow, experience and visual look and feel.
- User experience professionals can rapidly iterate proposed designs directly in front of customers, dramatically improving customer experience.
- Software sales teams can demo potential products to customers to get feedback before actually developing the application.
- The professional service teams can test a potential product for possible needed changes to speed implementation and integration.
- Sharing visualizations with global sourcing partners is not only easier but cheaper. Visualizations eliminate confusion with global development teams because everyone is speaking the same language.
- Resellers can sell a solution by showing a visualization of what a specific application could do when integrated into the customer’s environment
He wraps up by repeating his vision, “by 2020, all business software will be visualized before its built, just the same way that every car, airplane and semiconductor are visualized today.”
The entire piece is worth a read and can be found at SandHill.com.
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I ran across an interesting presentation (”Sketching in Code: Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions“) that David Vreba, Director of Technology at Adaptive Path, delivered at the UXWeek conference in August.
In particular, two slides in David’s presentation with the titles “Why Prototype?” caught my attention. These slides sum up in a nutshell why prototyping is so important:
- Visualize your requirements – save a lot of time and effort by not creating so many paper-based requirements that are difficult to review
- Get to market faster – generate a lot of cash by getting a better product to market faster.
Effective prototyping can reduce cycle times throughout the entire software development lifecycle.
David also presented 5 key reasons to prototype including:
- See problems more clearly
- See some problems at all
- Gain buy in from stakeholders
- Foster collaboration
- Help everybody understand what is possible
I think #2, “see some problems at all“, is one of the more overlooked reasons to prototype. In many cases, stakeholders may not even be aware of problems with usability, flow and design until you actually show them what you had in mind. This is because reams of text-based requirements written down on paper do not come close to showing someone what you meant.
Point #4 – “foster collaboration” – is probably the least expected side benefit of prototyping. Without even knowing it, sharing a prototype gets groups talking that may have never talked in the past. This then facilitates better communication throughout the rest of the project and has carryover benefits into the next project and beyond.
Most people need to visualize something and even better try something to truly understand it. And it is much better to show them early in a prototyping phase than near the end of the development lifecycle when the final product is almost complete.
You can learn more about David Vreba’s presentation, and download the slides and audio at this link.
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