Designers know the power of making improvements based on feedback. As you have seen already, this leads to much stronger designs in the end, but it also helps control costs, as it is far easier (and faster) to make necessary changes to sketches or storyboards than full-featured versions. Eventually, however, your design reaches the point where it needs to be a fully fleshed-out interface with which your users can interact. This is where prototypes come in, to further develop the user interface, examine design decisions and interaction flows, and gather feedback. There are several different considerations and decisions to make when creating prototypes based on what you want to get feedback on, how much you need to develop the interface, and the resources available to you.

In this course, you will create three different interactive prototypes for your design concept: a paper prototype, a medium-fidelity software prototype, and a high-fidelity software prototype. You will also make iterative improvements to your prototypes using rapid evaluation methods, relying on different design principles and heuristics. Throughout this course, you will gain valuable experience working with two prototyping software applications (Balsamiq and Figma), and you will continue to iterate with each prototyping technique toward a more developed user interface design.