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Interactive UX prototyping generates a prototype considering immediate feedback from the users and showcasing the initial functionality of the product. Rapid prototyping software helps create an MVP quickly using easy-to-use tools. Find out more about Montar Healthtech’s custom digital solutions to get the proper consultation on building a UI prototype for your healthcare solution. Get in touch with us today.
"Requirements definition has always been tricky in software development, but Interactive prototyping really shed light on this issue, making a big difference," observes Jack Bellis, Senior Information Architect at Elsevier.
Indeed, prototyping is key in addressing challenges early in developing healthcare digital products, ensuring the end result meets user needs.
Interactive prototyping for healthcare digital products, in particular, offers a seamless user experience, even under the time pressures and critical conditions faced by various stakeholders. But what exactly is interactive prototyping, and how does it differ from traditional prototype development?
This guide will delve into the world of interactive UX prototyping, providing you with insights and steps to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for a healthcare application.
Interactive prototyping generates a prototype considering immediate feedback from the users and showcasing the initial functionality of the product. This type of prototype helps developers get detailed insights into how users interact with the different elements of the app/website or product.
Developers can check the usability of the prototype design, address challenges, and fix issues before they start working on the actual coding. A functional prototype ensures that the healthcare company is creating an optimised product, delivering a frictionless user interface.
Interactive prototyping steps ahead of traditional methods by offering a dynamic and engaging way to create product prototypes. It goes beyond the usual approach, providing a realistic look and feel of the final product, which makes user testing and feedback more effective. Let’s understand more about their differences.
Traditionally, designers created prototypes with sketches, mockups, or wireframes using a paper-pen approach or digital software. It is a simple layout with functional elements and what tasks users can achieve from these elements. Such low-fidelity wireframes are static and depict a page schematic of a healthcare app.
While these traditional methods work well in the early phases of UX prototyping, designers can miss critical UI prototype design elements, thereby developing a less accurate healthcare product. Additionally, developers don’t have much data about user interaction and usability of the product.
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Interactive prototyping is also known as rapid prototyping, as it is quicker than a traditional UI prototype. An interactive digital prototype helps deliver an early product version by incorporating responsive design elements to understand user interactions comprehensively. Interactive prototyping creates a mockup with hyperlinks, clickable buttons, and navigation features to give the user an understanding of how the actual product or app will work.
It can rule out user assumptions in the design process and create interactions within the app to trigger appropriate responses. Catching pain points in the early phases accelerates the validation process and ensures all stakeholders are on the same page.
Prototype engineering for digital medical products can be time-consuming as well as costly. Thanks to rapid prototyping, healthcare product developers can tackle these challenges. Rapid prototyping tools and software help developers give users a taste of what the healthcare product will look like in reality without any technical or innate coding knowledge.
Such prototyping software offers an all-in-one UX prototyping platform to convert static design layouts into realistic prototypes in minutes. It fosters remote collaboration and high-fidelity prototypes with a drag-and-drop interface, design handoff, wireframing tools, advanced transitions, real-time preview and feedback options, and more. Healthcare companies can create digital prototypes (even 3D prototypes) quickly with such robust tools and software.
Rapid prototyping tools simplify the prototype design process and help designers jump from an idea to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) very quickly.
An MVP is a working product with essential features and elements to meet user expectations and requirements. It is created before the final version of the product to test and validate its functionality.
Any flaws or elements that hamper user experience can be rectified before developing the full-fledged product. Digital health tech companies can incorporate MVP’s user feedback and mitigate any risks associated with product development, saving precious time. Furthermore, they can save resources with an MVP and promote a robust product with a flawless user experience.
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Unlike traditional methods, interactive prototyping lets users enjoy using a genuine product instead of visual representations. Let’s understand the valuable benefits of interactive prototyping.
Digital health tech products must be accurate, which otherwise can lead to erroneous decision-making, affecting patient care. Interactive prototypes help to determine errors early on and alleviate associated risks. Moreover, healthcare companies can incorporate legitimate user feedback as users can interact with the product rather than just viewing a paper version.
Developers can minimise the risks of costly redevelopments, allocate resources wisely, and save time and money. Interactive prototype design ensures the healthcare product meets user needs before investing significant resources into building a full-featured app.
Interactive prototype development provides detailed user views and feedback on the app or specific functions. So, the team can make alterations more quickly in the designing phase than in the development phase.
Rapid prototyping software allows developers to make multiple modifications using their advanced and easy-to-use tools. Once all stakeholders approve the prototype, developers can code it clearly without worrying about post-production usability issues, reducing the development time.
With traditional prototype engineering practices, stakeholders spend more time evaluating the elements of the product and how one particular will help end users achieve a task. Moreover, critical stakeholders in healthcare products are doctors and patients, who are not designers. When they can interact with the final product design, they all share a common vision.
Combined with reduced development time, healthcare tech solution providers can ensure faster iteration cycles and time to market. Eventually, the product can capture a dominant market share and offset initial investments.
Now that you know about the significance of interactive prototypes and MVPs, let’s understand how you can build an MVP for your digital health product.
The first step to building any product is understanding user needs and analysing the pain points. One of the reasons products fail is the need for more market needs.
“Make sure your product is designed to meet the specific needs of your target audience, especially in addressing their daily healthcare issues. Also, don't forget to scope out the competition to see what they're bringing to the table,” says Kumar Gururajan, CTO Montar HealthTech.
An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is the initial functional version of a product focusing on core features. To define these, ask: What problem does the product solve? How does it benefit users? What makes it unique? The answers to these questions will highlight the essential features of your app, guiding what's worth testing.
How users interact with the product is vital when building an MVP. The UX and UI of the prototype should incorporate users’ perspectives and be easy to navigate. The product will not hold substantial value if users find it challenging. Mapping out user journeys will help chalk down steps users will take to perform a task. For example, steps to go through when scheduling an appointment on a healthcare app or downloading patients' vital stats.
After gathering insights on user expectations, key features, and crucial information architecture, it's time to create a wireframe. This basic version of your product outlines its look, feel, and user interaction. Wireframes allow designers to iterate and decide on elements to include in the development phase.
Convert the wireframe into an MVP and launch it. You can initially test the MVP amongst the team members and later give access to the end users. Typically, you can let users use the product and test the app's functionality for at least two weeks. Collect user feedback, behaviour analytics, and usage statistics to get a detailed understanding of user experience.
You can get a clear picture of what features to add, what elements to remove, where is the maximum friction, etc. Testing an MVP helps to finetune the first version of the product to ensure the full-fledged product is robust and user-friendly.
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Interactive prototyping ensures the best version of the final product as it considers immediate user feedback and creates an intuitive experience beyond traditional prototype development. Rapid prototyping tools make it possible to create attractive prototypes with frictionless functionalities. Eventually, the success of a healthcare product depends on how well it meets user needs.
Indeed, developing interactive UX prototypes is a fundamental process that needs the right guidance and design expertise to avoid any pitfalls. Our extensive experience combined with a comprehensive knowledge of functional requirements ensures we help build robust products in healthcare, streamlining product development. Get in touch with us today.
