House of Prototyping Guidelines: A Framework to Develop Theoretical Prototyping Strategies for Human-Centered Design

Prototyping is one of the most critical and costly steps in the product development process. However, the existing literature lacks in prototyping strategies that are comprehensive and widely accepted. Current prototyping strategies mostly focus on the hands-on activity of building the prototype by relying on the designer’s experience. Another limitation is that prototyping strategies often do not address human factors for prototyping human-centered products. This paper introduces a House of Prototyping Guidelines (HOPG) framework, which integrates the existing prototyping guidelines and human factor engineering principles for better prototyping outcomes. The methodology contains four steps. The first step pertains to the state-of-the-art prototyping literature review. The second step consists of filtering the prototyping findings and summarizing the key prototyping findings from Step 1. The third step presents the HOPG conceptual map, which is loosely based on the House of Quality (HOQ) approach. HOPG contains the Prototyping Categories and Prototyping Dimensions, which are similar to Customer Requirement and Engineering Requirement of HOQ, respectively. In the HOPG framework, designers go through the Prototyping Categories to understand the prototyping requirements and then identifies the Prototyping Dimensions to create the prototypes that fit human-centered design needs.