It has been argued that prototyping, in some form or another, should be used
all the time. However, prototyping is most beneficial in systems that will have
many interactions with the users.
It has been found that prototyping is very effective in the analysis and
design of on-line systems, especially for transaction processing, where the
use of screen dialogs is much more in evidence. The greater the interaction
between the computer and the user, the greater the benefit is that can be
obtained from building a quick system and letting the user play with it.
Systems with little user interaction, such as batch processing or systems
that mostly do calculations, benefit little from prototyping. Sometimes, the
coding needed to perform the system functions may be too intensive and the
potential gains that prototyping could provide are too small.
Prototyping is especially good for designing good human-computer interfaces.
"One of the most productive uses of rapid prototyping to date has been as a tool
for iterative user requirements engineering and human-computer interface
design."
