Web Design Ethiopia

The web designer’s goal is to create a site that seamlessly integrates strong and effective visuals, clear and intuitive navigation, and exciting and useful content. All of this can be achieved through a set of well-integrated mockup and prototyping processes.

A successful approach to mockups and prototype can yield great benefits including getting everyone involved, exploring and defining the design space, and providing for early user testing, as well as cutting costs, reducing errors, and improving quality.

Get Everyone Involved
Designs and abstract ideas are difficult to talk about without tangible artifacts to represent the ideas. Concrete examples are useful for getting everyone involved and on the same page.

Examples in the form of mockups or prototypes open communication channels and guide conversation toward explicit and useful comments and ideas.

In addition to providing the design team with a common artifact for discussion, mockups and prototypes also provide a more tangible product for clients to examine.

This makes the product “real” to clients and can be an effective way to win their involvement and support early in the process. (Early client involvement has some risks, however, see sidebar “Potential Pitfalls of Early Client Involvement.”)

Mockup and prototyping techniques help to increase involvement by providing common artifacts for examination, facilitating communication among the design team (users, clients, and designers) and fostering early client buy-into the project.

If your client is not accustomed to being involved early on in project development, you may experience some backlash in response to the “unprofessional” look and feel of early examples.

This can be easily diffused by describing (ahead of time) the procedures used and reassuring the client that these are tools to facilitate development.

Also, because mockups and prototypes are deliberately incomplete, clients can sometimes be distracted by the fact that they don’t fully implement every project requirement guessing perhaps that you’ve forgotten important elements.

Early on, stress to them that the purpose is to help them communicate and clarify their goals, and throughout the process, be sure to specify which aspects you’re prototyping and which aspects are being neglected.

For instance, an early mockup may be used to capture a visual style but not be intended to represent the final navigation labels or content.

Some clients like to ask that a mockup be correct in every detail. For some purposes, this may be useful, but in most cases, it is better to explain to them the cost tradeoffs involved and the logic of quickly iterating low-cost alternatives before building high-cost representations of the site.

Explore and Define the Design Space
Mockups and prototypes also provide an artifact that can help to define the limits of the design space within which you are working. Mockups and prototypes help by providing tests of feasibility and proof of concept, exploring various visual and structural arrangements, eliminating guesswork early on, and detecting errors at the earliest stage possible.

Provide For Early User Testing
Early and rough representation of content and functionality allow you to bring users into the design process in ways that traditional spec sheets and abstract definitions don’t. Providing a concrete example – even when not complete is more useful for examining how a user might react to a design. Mockups and prototypes provide a tool for early user testing, which in the long run will allow the site to be developed more quickly and cost effectively.

Mockups and prototypes provide a mechanism for gathering user data at the beginning of the design process, the means for gathering user feedback early in the design process, and a framework that allows user testing at the beginning of the design process.

Increase Quality, Cut Costs, and Reduce Errors
Design prototypes can provide you with early buy-in from your clients, a valuable user testing platform, a low-cost method for determining the feasibility of specific design ideas, and a method for catching errors early in the design cycle. The end result of all of this is quite simple: you’ll be designing user-centered, cost-effective, high-quality, successful designs.

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