What is application prototyping?
A prototype is an early, throwaway version of an application you build to explore an idea before committing to the real thing. It isn't an MVP - an MVP is a basic but genuinely usable product you'd put in front of real users. A prototype is rougher than that: a mock-up or experiment for working through the "what if" questions and pinning down what the software actually needs to do.
Prototyping, or building a proof of concept, is an important step in any web software project. Before you commit serious time and money, a prototype often surfaces challenges you hadn't spotted, or shows you the one feature that turns out to be essential.
At Si Novi we build prototype web and mobile applications all the time - both as an outsourced technology team for clients and for our own products. We're comfortable working at the alpha phase, where things are deliberately rough and the point is to learn quickly.
In this article I look at how we prototype, why it's worth doing, and how a prototype built on open-source technology and AWS can grow into the real application rather than being thrown away.
Rapid development to test ideas
We build prototypes with AWS and the web technologies we trust day to day - Node.js, JavaScript and PHP. The cloud services do a lot of the heavy lifting: AWS Cognito handles user login out of the box, and API Gateway lets us stand up mock APIs quickly, so we can scaffold a working web app and start testing an idea in days.
That speed is the whole point. Getting a working version in front of people within days or weeks, rather than months, means you can test your assumptions, gather feedback and change direction while it's still cheap to do so.
Converting Excel prototypes to web applications
A lot of prototypes don't start in code at all - they start in Excel. Spreadsheets are a quick way to test formulas and calculations, and plenty of non-technical people are perfectly happy building them, so they're a natural first prototype, particularly for anything with complex data handling or financial calculations. The trouble comes later: as the idea grows, an Excel model quickly runs out of road on scalability, user access and security.
To turn an Excel model into a web-based prototype or an MVP, a team like ours can reverse-engineer the logic in the spreadsheet and rebuild it as a proper database-backed web application.
Many of our web application projects started life as exactly this - a business spreadsheet managing some complex workflow or calculation. We identify the essential logic, reimplement it in a database-backed web app, and add the things a spreadsheet can't give you: role-based access, real-time collaboration, and encrypted data storage using AWS tools like Amazon RDS or DynamoDB.
Prototypes as a valuable building block
We try to build prototypes as building blocks for the eventual product. Strictly speaking a prototype isn't meant to be reusable - it's meant to be thrown away. But if you build it on open-source web technology and cloud services, a surprising amount of it can be kept, refactored and carried through into the polished product.
Infrastructure as code is a good example. We use AWS CloudFormation to script the setup of our AWS resources, so the environment we built for the prototype can be replicated or tweaked for the MVP phase rather than rebuilt from scratch. The work - and the investment - you put into the prototype keeps paying off later.
Should I build a prototype?
For most projects, yes - especially anything with a new or unproven idea at its heart. A prototype is a quick way to validate the concept, test how people actually use it, and confirm it's technically feasible before you commit to building the whole thing. More often than not it saves time and money, because it stops you pouring effort into features that turn out not to matter.
For web applications in particular, prototyping with open-source technology and AWS is cheap and quick, and it gets everyone - developers, designers and stakeholders - looking at the same thing rather than imagining different ones. That alone heads off a lot of nasty surprises later in the build.
A good prototype shows you the most promising route before you've spent real money finding out the hard way. Build it on scalable cloud services and open-source frameworks and it needn't be throwaway - it can become the foundation the MVP is built on. So if you're weighing up a new application or feature, a prototype is usually the smart first move. If that's where you are, get in touch and we'll help you build one.
