(Length: 17 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Prototypes are attractive to development teams because they have clear benefits. They facilitate communication by exposing design assumptions, drive ideation, and provide a vehicle for gathering user feedback. But prototypes are complex artifacts: They have many different dimensions and can be created with a variety of tools. Project teams that don't understand these complexities can waste time and effort — and even thwart project progress. Before they start to develop a prototype, project teams need to consider the business objectives that are driving their efforts — and then manipulate prototype attributes to support these needs.