• Home
• /
• Benefits
• /
• Make Product Presentations Early & Clearly

Make Product Presentations Early & Clearly

Where's the ROI?

How do you justify an investment in application development, if there's nothing to show yet? The most accepted manner — PowerPoint presentation with bulleted lists and diagrams — can't give the ability to “touch” the product. Here is one more problem — when the project is in its initial phase, it's hard to evaluate development costs precisely, but investors like accurate numbers.

Preliminary user interface modeling and design resolves several problems at once. First of all, people at a presentation session will easily get into what the application is when they will see it in action. Although it's not developed yet, the prototype — one of the user interface modeling and design process results — works well in this case. As a demonstrative and useful presentation tool for marketing needs, it simulates the real application and gives insight into what it will be before development starts. Secondly, when user interface is defined in detail, development costs can be estimated and accurate project plans can be created. And thirdly, users can get acquainted with the application so they're ready to use it.

That's why money spent on user interface modeling and design results in better and more vivid product presentations.

Business Cases

“Sometimes it may be difficult for a client to understand the brilliance of the user experience that is being proposed because they cannot experience it for themselves. Miscommunication can result from misunderstood verbal descriptions of how users will interact with a flat prototype. We experienced this on a project where client team members were located on multiple continents and had varying English skills. By demonstrating the functionality instead of describing it, we were able to greatly reduce miscommunication that initially resulted from teleconferences and documents in rough English.

Furthermore, team members in different time zones could review designs that we posted on their own time without additional explanation. By allowing our client to experience the interaction, we knew that they understood exactly what we were talking about and had agreed with the direction we were heading early on in the process.”

“Communication through demonstration is especially important when the project does not have a pre-defined functional specification, i.e., a definitive list of the functionality and/or content areas that the product must have. For example, on the Elevon project, we were hired at the beginning of the project to help replace old desktop client server software with a shiny new web application. At this stage, there was no specification, so our work played an integral part in helping define the product's functionality. By creating interactive wireframes that represented the functionality under discussion, we were able to quickly reach agreement on what worked best for the end users. Furthermore, everyone could click through the wireframe prototype to make sure that all the pieces were in there, and any functionality that had been casually discussed wasn't getting lost. The Elevon team also used the prototype to reach internal consensus and demonstrate the project's progress to management.”

The above excerpts are from the article “HTML Wireframes and Prototypes: All Gain and No Pain” by Julie Stanford. Click on the link to read more.

Have a question? Feel free to contact us.

Back to Benefits List