Exercises: Prototyping: concept and purpose

Define what a prototype is and explain its main purpose in the development of a new product or service.

Distinguish between low-fidelity prototypes (sketches, paper, cardboard) and high-fidelity prototypes (nearly functional), and explain why initial testing is carried out using low-fidelity prototypes even if they "look like toys".

The figure shows three levels of fidelity in prototyping a mobile app, from lowest to highest. Identify the missing intermediate level, marked with '?', and explain what can be validated with it that cannot be validated with the paper sketch.

A team wants to create a book-sharing app for neighbors. Before writing any code, they draw the screens on paper and ask five neighbors to 'use' them with their finger. Explain what they can validate in this way (navigation, clarity, interest) and what things they will not be able to validate until they have the real app.

You can do it on paper and send a photo with your answer.

Explain how a service is prototyped, given that it is not a physical object: what techniques allow it to be tested before launching (role-playing with actors, a pilot with a few customers, manual simulation of the service) and give an example of each.

A company spent a year and all its savings manufacturing 5 000 units of a kitchen gadget without showing it to anyone beforehand, and barely sold any. Analyse what process errors it made and what it would have found out with three successive cheap prototypes.

An entrepreneurial team wants to launch an anti-theft backpack with a biometric lock and cut-resistant fabric onto the market. They have 2,000 pesos and 6 weeks before pitching the project to an investor panel. One of the partners suggests directly commissioning a factory for a finished functional prototype for 1,800 pesos. Critically evaluate this proposal in terms of resource allocation and business risk, and design an alternative three-stage consecutive prototyping plan (specifying the type and fidelity level of the prototype, the learning objective, and the success metric for each phase) that optimizes the available budget.

A startup is simultaneously developing two projects: a mobile app for hospital shift management and an ultralight ergonomic wheelchair. The CTO suggests applying an "evolutionary prototyping" strategy in both cases, arguing that this avoids wasting resources on disposable materials and speeds up development. Analyze the economic and technical suitability of this decision for each of the two projects, anticipate the risks of applying such an approach to the physical product versus the digital one, and propose the most efficient prototyping strategy in each case.

A traditional bakery is considering investing 9,000 pesos in machinery to produce sugar-free wholemeal pastries, but fears that its regular clientele might reject the product due to taste or a price premium. Design a phased, very low-cost prototyping plan in three stages to validate real demand before undertaking the investment. For each phase, you must specify: the hypothesis being tested, the chosen prototyping artifact or experiment, and the exact quantitative criterion that would justify advancing to the next phase or canceling the project.