IT Glossary
What is a prototype?
The interactive mock-up of a product: it looks and feels like the finished application, without real functionality — built to be tested before it is built.
One hour against three days: that is roughly the exchange rate between fixing a design mistake in a mock-up and fixing the identical mistake in a built application. A prototype is what lets you trade at the favorable rate — an interactive mock-up of the application, with screens drawn and linked together in a tool such as Figma, which you can tap, navigate and walk through as if the product already existed, except that nothing sits behind it: no code, no database, no logic. Design errors are invisible in documents and obvious in use, which is why something usable should exist before anything is built. Correct use has two faces. With real users, you place the prototype in the hands of five to seven people from the target audience, give them concrete tasks — order product X, find the invoice from March — and then stay quiet: where they hesitate, where they tap wrongly, what they never find, every stumble is a cheap correction. Five users surface most of the major problems, one of the oldest statistics in the field. With the development team, a validated prototype becomes the most precise specification available, and quotes built on one are noticeably more accurate than quotes built on a requirements document, because nothing describes a product more clearly than a working simulation of it. The confusion worth avoiding: a prototype is not an early version of the product, which is the MVP, and it does not verify technical feasibility, which is the proof of concept.
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Why it matters for your business
Corrections made while they still cost an hour
Confusing flows and pointless screens are found and repaired in the mock-up — not in the built application, where the same correction costs days.
Everyone sees the same product
The prototype removes the game of telephone between your vision, the requirements document and the developers’ imagination — the discussion runs on something concrete.
More accurate quotes and timelines
An estimate made against a validated prototype beats any estimate against a text document — the supplier prices what they can see rather than what they interpreted.
Frequently asked questions
What does a prototype cost, and how long does it take for a business application?
Typically one to three weeks, and a budget in the hundreds to low thousands of euros for the main flows of a medium-sized application — a small fraction of the project, with a disproportionate effect on its accuracy. Many teams include it inside the analysis phase; if a proposal jumps straight from conversation to development on a project with a non-trivial interface, it is worth asking why.
How do I test a prototype properly, and with how many people?
The rule of five: five to seven users from the real audience surface most of the major problems. The method is concrete tasks such as book an appointment for Tuesday, silent observation without guiding anybody, since their stumbles are your data, and open questions at the end. Avoid testing on colleagues who already know the product, and avoid demonstrations where you navigate while they nod politely — that is theatre rather than a test.
Does an approved prototype guarantee the final product will look identical?
It is a specification of form, not a frozen contract: development still brings adjustments from technical constraints and cases discovered along the way. What changes is that deviations from a validated prototype become visible and discussable, which is precisely the point — differences get negotiated explicitly instead of discovered at delivery. Good practice attaches the prototype to the contract as a reference, with a defined change procedure.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247