ABSTRACT
This chapter describes tools and techniques for using prototypes to design interactive systems. It aims to illustrate how they can help designers generate and share new ideas, get feedback from users or customers, choose among design alternatives, and articulate reasons for their final choices. The chapter deals with definition of a prototype and discusses prototypes as design artifacts, introducing several dimensions for analyzing them. It also discusses the role of prototyping within the design process, in particular the concept of a design space and how it is expanded and contracted by generating and selecting design ideas. Prototyping is an iterative process and all prototypes provide information about some aspects while ignoring others. Prototypes are explicit representations that help designers, engineers and users reason about the system being built. The level of precision usually increases as successive prototypes are developed and more and more details are set. Rapid prototypes are especially important in the early stages of design.
