How to Prototype: First, You Get It Wrong

Here's the link for Aza Raskin, Creative Director at Mozilla's, fantastic talk about how you do rapid prototyping to get from an idea to execution.   It's reblogged from Boing Boing and the #Drumbeat website

HOWTO prototype and iterate for fun and profit

Cory Doctorow at 5:48 AM Tuesday, Nov 9, 2010  

In this 30+ minute video, Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin explains why you'd want to do iterative prototyping and how you do it in order to get from idea to execution. I think that the Internet's ability to support and sustain low-cost iteration is its signal virtue, but this virtue is often missed by bigger, older institutions that are accustomed to high failure costs (e.g., you print a million of the wrong book or make a million of hte wrong shirt, it's a big deal; you serve a million of the wrong page and change the design, it's business as usual).

For those who do not want to sit through the 30-minutes romp and my rapid prototyping, here are the principals of prototyping that I explain fully in talk:

1. Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.
2. Aim to finish a usable artifact in a day. This helps you focus and scope.
3. You are making a touchable sketch. Do not fill in all the lines.
4. You are iterating your solution as well as your understanding of the problem.
5. Treat your code as throw-away, but be ready to refactor.
6. Borrow liberally
7. Tell a story with your prototype. It isn't just a set of features.