3 Rules of Rapid Prototyping

Tom Chi, formerly of Google, gives a short but insightful talk on how they prototyped early versions of Google Glass (kind of awesome website). He shares three rules for rapid prototyping:

  1. Find the quickest path to experience.
  2. Doing is the best kind of thinking.
  3. Use materials that move at the speed of thought to maximize your rate of learning.

These are really good rules…in general you should try to iterate as fast as possible while testing relevant hypotheses. In most cases this means very low fidelity. In hardware this is coat hangers and clay, in software this is sketches and post-its.

Published: February 26th, 2013