Prototype testing: 10 steps to nailing your next product iteration

Your team has been working relentlessly on the latest design—it’s looking great and you’re eager to get it into the hands of users. But before it becomes a reality, it’s time to get feedback and test your prototype with real users.

Testing a prototype allows you to learn rapidly and adjust accordingly, so you can launch successful products and release new features at any stage in the product lifecycle.

In this article, we take you through the step-by-step process for testing your prototype—plus, tips from product experts Caitlin Goodale and Chris Roy to make the most of your prototype testing.

Prototype testing is the process of testing an early version of a product or feature with real users. The purpose of prototype testing is to validate the design before development starts and identify problems early on, so you can build a product that meets user needs and expectations.

By testing prototypes, you gather insights on:

Your prototype doesn’t have to be perfect or fully functional at this stage, but it needs to have the basic functionality to solve your users’ main problem (or represent how it will do this). You can test manually in person or through virtual tools and prototype testing software.

Depending on where you are in product design and development, there are different types of prototypes that vary in complexity, these are:

A low fidelity (lo-fi) prototype is an inexpensive and rough version of your product. It could come in the form of a wireframe, a homemade paper sketch, or a cardboard 3D model (if your product is physical).

With a lo-fi prototype, you’re looking to validate concepts and design expected paths for users. You want to keep cost and effort to a minimum, so some elements won’t be finalized or even included. For example, you might include critical buttons, e.g. add to cart, while the rest aren’t clickable yet. You probably won’t have a finalized copy in this version either. Lo-fi prototype testing happens at the earliest stages of the design process.

What to test at this stage:

A medium fidelity (mid-fi) prototype gives users a more developed view of how the product will work. It can be used to test paths and gather user feedback. They can click on buttons and explore the product, and you can even test out specific user paths. Key pages will have some copy and design elements already, but secondary pages may still use placeholders. You’ll also get to review the information architecture at this stage. Since a mid-fi prototype is closer to your final solution, it’ll be more costly and time-consuming to create than a lo-fi prototype.

What to test at this stage:

A high fidelity (hi-fi) prototype is more expensive to develop, being very similar to the finished product. Hi-fi prototypes should be fully usable and have all the needed buttons, copy, and menus available for the user to review. You can also review the final design, fonts, and colors at this stage. However, it doesn’t need to show all your planned features, and some clicks or paths might still feel clunky. Typically, you’d use hi-fi prototypes to conduct usability testing and final checks before launch.

What to test at this stage:

The biggest benefit of testing prototypes is being able to continuously iterate and launch products that accurately serve your user’s needs. However, that’s not the only advantage of this practice.

We spoke to Chris Roy, Head of Product Design at Stuart, and Caitlin Goodale, former Senior Product Designer at Memrise, to cover the top reasons behind prototype testing.

Imagine launching a product and then realizing your users struggle to find the ‘continue to checkout’ button. It’s a design flaw that has a direct impact on your revenue and is going to be a headache to solve when your site is already coded and live.

The most effective way to identify these black holes in your design is by testing your prototype before launching new features and making timely adjustments. If you’re using Maze, your team can import your clickable designs easily with the AdobeXD, Figma, Marvel, InVision, and Sketch integrations.

Let’s say your checkout button is on the left side of the screen and you want to know if users find it easier to locate when it’s on the right side. This is the perfect time to test your prototype with A/B testing. “It’s worth going to the lengths of creating a prototype if you have a hypothesis to prove or debunk,” says Chris Roy, Head of Product Design at Stuart. This will help focus your efforts and make your findings more actionable.

To validate your hypothesis, run tests to answer questions like:

Answer the previous questions at all stages of product development, and after launch, so you can continuously iterate and improve your product.

Caitlin Goodale, former Senior Product Designer at Memrise, says, “Things that seemed clear to us on the product team were often totally incomprehensible to real users.” By speaking directly to the people using the product, your team can empathize with users and identify any false assumptions or cognitive biases, prior to launch.

If your customers have a negative experience with your product, you’ll get negative feedback. The best way to avoid this is by getting input from real users before you release.

Caitlin explains that her team always tries to get real users to interact with the product, “to get an early read on how the design is working, what they understand, and what they don’t”. As she experienced, prototype testing allows you to preempt problems before they become negative reviews, and understand user needs before they become poor user experiences.

The saying ‘it’s better safe than sorry’ was made for prototype testing. It’s much cheaper and far less time-consuming to fix a design in the prototype stage before release, than it is to deploy bug fixes, respond to unsatisfied users, and potentially re-release the entire product.

If you have a solid prototype testing regime in place, you can avoid the lost resources (and reputation) spent rectifying a problem that could have been spotted sooner. “It’s so important to have a broad perspective on the designs we’ve made and identify issues before we invest money and time in developing them fully with the dev team,” says Caitlin.

You have two options for your new product: one solves your users’ problem in less steps, the other has a longer user journey but will be faster to build. Your gut says option A would serve your user better, but understandably, the board is more likely to sign off on option B.

When you invest in A/B and usability testing for both prototypes, you get the evidence you need: your users lose interest fast with option B and tell you they wouldn’t use a product that involves that many steps. Now, you can attend the board meeting with genuine feedback and real user data—ultimately getting buy-in for the best product you can make.

Testing your prototype gives you access to a diverse and vast world of user feedback. The insights you get are tightly linked to the type of user research and methods you use—there are many user research methods that work for prototype testing, but here are our top four:

This UX research method consists of testing two alternative versions of your design (A vs. B) on different user pools, and developing the version that has better feedback—or creating a better new option. With A/B testing, your design team will of course need to have two options to test on real users. You can do this with any type of prototype: lo-fi, mid-fi, or high-fi. It’s helpful to conduct A/B testing when prototyping a complete application, adding a new feature, or revamping a current app or site.

Usability testing tells you how intuitive your app is and how easy it is for users to complete certain tasks. Usability is a crucial step for any product, and it’s possible to run usability tests on any type of prototype—so you can test, iterate, and test again throughout development. There are multiple usability testing methods that allow you to test navigability, accessibility, and UI on paper sketches, digital wireframes, or clickable designs.

When you have a lo-fi mockup of a design—a wireframe—you can use it to test its usability and functionality. During wireframe testing, you should give your users detailed tasks for them to complete on your interface design.

You can conduct moderated or unmoderated wireframe tests and get a mix of quantitative and qualitative user insights. During a wireframe test, you’ll be able to catch issues with confusing set paths, unclear information hierarchy, or vague copy.

This term is often used interchangeably with concept validation, but while they have similar definitions, there’s a key differentiator: concept testing invites you to test multiple assumptions and ideas, and choose the ones you’ll use moving forward.

Concept validation, on the other hand, allows you to assess the feasibility of your product idea with real potential users, before starting to design and build the product. This stage is critical during prototype development because it confirms whether you’re working on the right solution, in the right way, and reveals if your product has a market fit.

Testing your prototype early allows you to iterate and go to market with a tool that’s more likely to do well. As David Kelley, founder of IDEO, says: “Fail faster, succeed sooner.” But what does it mean to test early? Here are some scenarios when you should test your prototype:

The sooner you get users’ eyes on your design, the better. Lo-fi prototype testing happens at the earliest stages of the design process with a paper prototype or basic wireframe.

As you move onto your mid-fidelity designs, you should be taking all the user feedback onboard, polishing your design up, and beginning to add some early-stage copy. You want to really validate your concepts here—so remember to test early and often, and iterate continuously.

You can use a user testing or product discovery tool like Maze to conduct your prototype tests—create tests in minutes using a pre-built template, and import sketches from any of your preferred design tools.

It’s time to get user feedback on your hi-fi design—after you’ve made changes in your UX design tool based on the findings of your lo-mid-fidelity tests.

At this stage, you’re confident with your design—any big issues have been solved during earlier tests. You shouldn’t be looking for huge UX flaws, instead, use this stage to truly validate your final iteration and uncover any hidden usability issues before handing over the designs to the development team.

Product iterations also start with a prototype. Don’t wait until you have the perfect design to conduct user research. Instead, test your new feature sketches, conduct a card sorting test to identify the best place to add it to your site, and wireframe to test navigation to the new feature.

Plus, once you have a hi-fi prototype, you can launch the new feature for beta testing. That way, you can get real customers to engage and give feedback. Get insights on:

Right—it’s time to test your prototype and start collecting insightful product information coming from users. Here’s how to get started:

Clarity is key here. What exactly are you looking to test? Define clear and measurable testing objectives so you get the actionable key results you’re after. For example:

❌ “I want to test my prototype”

✅ “I want to find out if people can book a hotel through my prototype in under three minutes”

❌ “I want to see if people like the design”

✅ “I want to see if users can navigate with ease through my app and get a SUS of over 70”

❌ “I want to know if the copy is engaging”

✅ “I want at least 10% of survey respondents to say they’d make a purchase after reading the copy”

Determining your test goals early on allows you to give specific direction to designers on the type of prototype they’ll need to build.

Before you even create the prototype, choose a user testing tool that allows you to conduct the type of research you need. For example, if you want a tool that allows you to conduct a wireframe or complete prototype test using a clickable design, you could consider Maze—a usability testing tool that lets you evaluate multiple aspects of your design. And if you want to see and hear from your users as they go through your test, use Clips to get qualitative and quantitative feedback on your product.

This is the moment to let your design experts go to work. Brief your product and design teams on the type of test and objectives:

User research is only valuable if the users in question are the right people for your product. Choosing the wrong audience can cause you to make product decisions based on irrelevant data, or provide incorrect assumptions about your product.

For example, if you were launching sales software aimed at salespeople aged 60+ who are less tech-savvy, you’ll need to target that demographic when recruiting test participants. Testing the same tool on sales reps with an in-depth understanding of new technologies might result in an overcomplicated app for your real target market.

If you’re launching new features on a live product, your team should run tests on a mix of current and new users to gather more realistic insights. “Generally, you want a diverse group of testers reflecting the different personas within your product—but remember, often people who are not currently users might become them,” explains Caitlin. When you’re building a new product or feature, testing with a range of personas will highlight any pain points that could stop you from reaching a larger audience.

When selecting your method, refer back to the first step and the goals you’re trying to achieve with your prototype test. For example, if you want to test your product copy, it doesn’t make sense to conduct a card sorting test. Think about:

If you have a physical product with specific supervision required, it might be necessary to invite users to an in-person location, however, this can be a costly way of testing. For those of us in the digital world, it’s quicker to use a remote research tool like Maze which helps you gather insights from users globally.

It’s critical that your team knows how to create test scenarios. Each task needs to be clear and drive action, e.g ‘Show me the steps you’d follow to sign up to the app using a Gmail account’ or ‘Schedule a meeting with three team members’. Encourage people to speak aloud as they attempt to do it.

Encourage your team to create more detailed scenarios that share a story so your users feel drawn into the situation, and have the full context before performing a task. Paint a picture, for example, if you were testing a food delivery platform:

“It’s a Saturday morning and you’re in the mood for brunch. You don’t feel like cooking so you choose to order in. You don’t want to spend over $20. Choose a restaurant that will deliver to your house in under 30 minutes.”

This gives your user the opportunity to take their own path as they test your prototype. Different people will interact in different ways.

When conducting prototype testing, your team has the chance to ask usability questions that will give you even more insight—make sure they know how to ask the right research questions to get effective feedback. You can ask questions in moderated sessions or through user surveys.

For a whistle stop tour of how to ask effective questions, watch this video:

Otherwise, here’s a breakdown of questions you can share with your team to ask at different stages of prototype testing:

To wrap up the session, Chris recommends asking “What one thing would you improve about [X]?” because it's specific and encourages honesty. He explains “People tend to be overly polite even after a horrendous session,” due to social desirability bias. “They will often answer ‘it was okay' when asked general questions, like ‘How did you find that?’. By framing it more concretely and requesting they change one thing, it helps them to be more honest.”

Before you launch the test, ask your team to do a trial run with a colleague or friend to check if the set-up works as expected, and all your questions make sense, before heading to the real-world test.

If you’re hosting moderated sessions, sit through the session and ask timely questions. Rewatch the meetings, highlight insights, and come up with a report. Or, if you’re hosting unmoderated and remote sessions, simply send out the test link to your participants and wait for the results to roll in. If you’re using Maze, you can contact your participants directly from the app through the Reach feature, or use In-Product Prompts to recruit testers straight from your website.

After your team comes back to you with responses and you analyze the test results—it’s time to share them with other key stakeholders. Whether it’s good—cue the celebration!—or not so great—cue the commiseration…—you now know what you need to improve. You have a direction for how to adjust the UI and UX, and iterate to get closer to your product launch.

It’s important your team collects all user research in a shared location so everyone can access it and avoid making similar mistakes in the future. “Centralize your results and distribute the highlights to the team—testing done in a vacuum is useless,” explains Chris. “Distill the best parts of research and make sure everyone from sales to marketing to engineering knows all the interesting things you just found out.”

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: discovery happens all the time—it’s not just during concept validation or prototype testing the initial sketch of your application. Testing prototypes through continuous research keeps you in close contact with your users, building solutions that truly work for them.

Plus, you can bet your competitors are always improving their platforms, adding new features, and simplifying workflows. So testing and iterating continuously gives you a competitive advantage that will help you maintain and grow your user base.

After you’ve launched your product, remember to conduct Live Website Testing to see how your real users interact with a published version of your site. That way, you’re always putting your user’s interests at the core of your business, and continuously delivering value.

It’ll take a few tries to really nail your prototype testing process. With practice, you’ll learn how to lead your team to conduct prototype testing at pace, continuously. If you’re still feeling a bit unsure, here are our top tips to shorten that trial-and-error period:

If you’re looking for a product discovery tool that allows anyone from the product team to conduct research at any stage of the development process, try Maze. With Maze, your team will be able to run multiple user testing methods and get results within hours.