Prototyping is crucial to the way that we approach projects at Crux; we fail fast, learn quickly and incrementally improve a design until it looks and works beautifully. We'll prototype surface models to understand how an object looks in it's intended environment, while at the same time design rigs that allow us to understand, test and develop aspects of a product functionality. For this reason, we've invested heavily in equipment, facilities and expertise to allow us to prototype these physical interactions, but with the increase of digital products how can we rapidly prototype human-machine interfaces?
It starts with hiring the right people, in the last year we've grown both our creative and electronics & software teams to meet the demand for creating sophisticated, seamlessly intuitive digital products and services. One of the internal tools we are developing is a low investment, rapid prototyping tool for testing user interfaces and gathering valuable 'user insight' to help drive embryonic design options. Using a combination of software programmes used by the UX industry we can integrate working interfaces onto concept visualisations and get users interacting with prototypes using a smartphone or tablet. This could be an electro-mechanical medical device, or an IOT consumer product, in this case we've shared an example for a smart washing machine.
