Rotate

Please rotate your device.

Our website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while you’re here.

Swirl

Rapid Prototyping

Evolve products and processes at speed

hero__CTD_rapid-prototyping
one

Real-Time Solution Design

two

Stakeholder Alignment

three

User Testing

The Challenge

Lack of alignment and clarity leads to failed products.

Today’s organizations are tasked with developing solutions that achieve an ever-expanding set of success criteria. But designing and implementing a winning technical solution is no easy task — it involves a number of carefully-executed stages and requires expert project and product management.

Without adequate planning, preparation, and alignment, diverging stakeholder opinions and shifting project requirements quickly muddy the vision. Teams struggle to develop best-fit solutions as they attempt to pinpoint end-user challenges and gain consensus around desired outcomes.

As such, many organizations find themselves at the end of the project pipeline, only to realize they’ve pushed out the wrong product — one that fails to solve the right problem or adequately meet the needs of their customers. Months’ worth of upfront labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars are rendered obsolete as project teams revert back to the drawing board.

 

CASE STUDY

Government

When a large federal organization realized that their RFI vendor requirements failed to meet the level of detail required to produce an informed selection, they turned to SEI. We launched several low-fidelity workflows to elicit more granular vendor requirements and conduct a more comprehensive vendor review.

Our Approach

Create simple, powerful prototypes that keep solutions on track.

At SEI, we understand that without a highly-collaborative approach to project management and solution delivery, the design process suffers from boundless feedback loops, lengthy bottlenecks, and splintered consensus.

Pairing an agile framework with a collaboration-focused methodology, we work hand-in-hand with our clients to guide every stage of the design and development process. Our three-step, highly iterative approach to prototyping is designed to generate rapid results, shorten feedback loops, and accelerate product delivery:

  1. Define — Beginning with a concept, we adopt user-centric thinking to pinpoint end-user pain points and requirements. We establish the creative vision for the impending iteration, which serves as a North Star for designers.
  2. Design — Once project priorities are defined, we construct a low-fidelity prototype — a simplified mockup of a product’s basic workflow and requirements. While elemental by nature, this powerful mockup allows stakeholders to envision the solution in action.
  3. Validate — As stakeholders click through the interactive prototype, we gain feedback to verify if project benchmarks are being met and identify opportunities for improvement.

This entire process is quick, efficient, and, most importantly, iterative, taking place as many times as necessary until consensus is reached.

 

CASE STUDY

Legal Technology Provider

A cutting-edge innovation department struggled to unify its stakeholders and outline a clear project scope. We integrated rapid prototyping, user experience techniques, and agile best practices to identify a best-fit approach and increase trust and transparency among key stakeholders.

The Results

Accelerate product delivery and save on lost resources.

As a project moves from its low-fidelity to high-fidelity stages, certain inputs — including the required human capital, time, and resources — inevitably rise.

That’s why, at SEI, we leverage agile methodologies and a highly iterative prototyping process that allows new ideas to fail fast before extensive upfront investment has been made. Our quick and efficient prototyping process has been proven to reduce rework by 60 to 80%, accelerate speed-to-market by up to 40%, and shorten project feedback loops by 90%.

Whether we’re creating prototypes for a custom solution, defining critical requirements for a vendor assessment, or configuring an off-the-shelf product, we empower teams to test and deploy their solutions faster and more effectively — all the while ensuring the model is positioned for long-term viability.

 

CASE STUDY

Beverage Producer

A leading beverage producer needed to enhance their research and design process, replacing a desktop-based authoring system with a more innovative application. SEI leveraged rapid prototyping to produce a working version of a new application in just four days.