Traditionally, if we said low fidelity, medium fidelity and high fidelity, you’d think we’d be talking about physical products of websites. But the same applies to building cloud-based application prototypes as well. How much functionality do you require to make the prototype viable?

Low Fidelity

This is the lowest cost but also the absolute basics. It is a very rough application, a basic cloud deployment. Enough to show its viability and gather some feedback, but not much more.

Medium Fidelity

A medium-fidelity prototype attempts to balance cost, time and functionality. More user interactions are built out, and the cloud backend is more fleshed out and designed for scale and flexibility, but it still needs to be feature-complete. Design patterns, interfaces, and interactions might need more work.

High Fidelity

Finally, a high-fidelity mockup is designed to be close to the real thing. With a structured and scalable backend, most user interactions, website assets and the like are in place. When put in front of test users, they shouldn’t be able to tell this isn’t a fully functioning product. Of course, the trade-off here is that it costs the most. The feedback may mean there are decisions to be made about reworking it, so we’d only recommend a high-fidelity prototype if the customer is sure their structure and framework for the product aren’t likely to change massively after some end-user testing.