Prototyping: A Love Story

I am tremendously embarrassed to admit this, however, if two months ago someone asked me the question, “What’s a prototype?”, I might stare at them blindly for a few seconds until I could conjure up a response using context clues. Today, my response to that question would be quite different.

As my career shifted from legal practice to IT, I was forced to approach the new field in a seemingly untraditional way. I had no formal experience in IT, so I used my technical skills and quick ability to learn as a way to teach myself what I needed to know. I spent a tremendous amount of time doing research in an attempt to develop a sound understanding of computers, technology, systems, and the way it all worked together. I spent countless hours of my free time teaching myself how to code. At first, I experimented with different programming languages and jumped from an HTML/CSS course to a Python course, from a SQL course to a JavaScript course, and then strangely found myself toying with Ruby. Eventually, I realized that the traditional approach to learning these languages would be my ally, and I reassessed my course flow in a way that made sequential sense (according to my research) and that would hopefully prevent me from becoming a jack of all code and master of none.

As we move forward with prototyping, I find myself so deeply wishing I allocated more time to researching the aspects and benefits of prototyping before I started writing. I wouldn’t define my headspace or skill set as solely backend, so I have found the idea of prototyping to be both extraordinarily beneficial and rewarding. Web development most certainly brings an eventual satisfaction, however, having the opportunity to witness the full (or at least pretty close to the full) user experience before a single style sheet is written is nothing short of awesome. Not only does prototyping allow you to design more freely, it also allows you to test. As the importance of usability testing becomes clearer, so too does the importance of prototyping. I look forward to developing my prototyping expertise and utilizing prototypes in order to enhance my overall skill set.