ABSTRACT
Prototyping is a high value development activity. The reason for prototyping is to find out
something one does not know, and not to demonstrate something already known. Often,
people lost in the prototyping activities forget the fact that the major purpose, or sometimes
the only purpose, of developing a prototype is to evaluate a new concept or an unknown. By
paying attention to the prototyping results and assessment, one can greatly improve the
product performance. The purpose of prototype assessment is to conduct an evaluation
to (1) provide answers to design questions, (2) improve the prototype or design, (3) review
the usefulness of evaluation provided by the prototype, and (4) transform evaluation results
into design or revision recommendations. Therefore, before conducting any assessment, the
objective of the prototyping activities should be clearly defined, the prototyping methods
should be consistent with the objective, and the testing or measurement should be able to
achieve the original prototype objective. Therefore, the following structure can be followed
to set up the prototype assessment plan:
1. Review prototype objective
Is the prototype objective to learn more about customer requirements, to show
proof of concept to senior management, to validate system specifications, to resolve
fuzziness in early stages of design, to explore solutions to specific usability or design
problems, to integrate subsystems, to manage change requests, to pretrain users or to
create a marketing demo, to improve customer acceptance, to assure product quality,
or to enforce milestones, etc.?
