The importance of turning an idea into a prototype

The faster an idea can be turned into a tangible prototype, the greater the opportunities and advantages. There are several key benefits to building rough prototypes as quickly as possible:

• Get customer feedback early: By creating prototypes that embody an idea, even in a basic form, you can get real user feedback much sooner. Customers can experience the idea, comment on what they like and don’t like, and suggest important changes to make the final product more useful and appealing. Incorporating feedback early avoids wasting time and resources developing features or designs that don’t resonate with customers.
• Discover flaws and issues early: Early prototypes highlight any problems with how an idea might work in practice. Issues that are hard to identify conceptually become immediately obvious when developing a prototype. These issues can then be addressed, and alternative approaches can be explored before a massive amount of time has been invested. It’s far easier to change course with a prototype than with a nearly finished product.
• Gauge viability and enthusiasm: By demonstrating prototypes for others, including team members, managers, mentors, and investors, you can get a sense of how compelling and exciting they seem. Enthusiasm and validation at early stages provide confidence that an idea has real potential and traction. A lack of enthusiasm shows that an idea may not be as promising as what people first thought.
• Iterate and improve rapidly: Prototyping, by its nature, enables an iterative approach. You build, get feedback, make changes, build again, and continue refining. Each iteration improves the prototype, making it more attractive and useful. What starts as a basic mockup can quickly evolve into an engaging product concept through ongoing feedback and development.

Turning ideas into prototypes as rapidly and as frequently as possible leads to better products, happier customers, higher enthusiasm within teams and partners, and a greater likelihood of building something that ultimately succeeds in the market. Early and iterative prototyping opens up opportunities and advantages at every stage of development and product design. With quick prototypes, you can pivot, improve, and innovate your way to success.

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced Streamlit from a theoretical point of view and looked at several reasons that make this framework an incredible tool for creating web applications and prototypes quickly and easily. Turning an idea into a prototype – or even better, into a working web application – quickly, easily, and painlessly is a terrific weapon in our hands. The power of such a library can only be fully expressed by using it, so let’s not wait any longer and start setting up our coding environment!

To start coding, we still need some things: a good operating system with a Python installation, an integrated development environment (IDE), virtual environments, and more.

In the next chapter, we are going to ensure that everything we need will be available and fully functioning. Don’t worry – this installation will act as the foundation for all our future developments!