I'm a big fan of the Lean philosophy for building things: businesses, products, user experiences, software, etc. This is one of the reasons I help organize the Lean Coffee meeting in SF (Tuesday mornings, come out and join!) Simple prototypes can be used to test things, rather than building a complete first version to validate an idea (which produces Waste, which Lean is designed to avoid).

This is why I'm so pleased to see my friends at Lumatic (the company formerly known as Omniar) taking advantage of this for their product and UX.

They built a static HTML version of the product that simulates many of the user interactions and the interface. At the end, they use a free survey from SurveyMonkey to collect feedback. Even better, they're building a mobile app, and have still prototyped using HTML.

This is a great way of collecting thoughts from users, instead of only sitting down with users one-on-one (which they're also doing). They can find out if there are missing features, or if people are interested in the features that are there.

I've seen other effective prototypes done using paper -- if you're going to be collecting information from users that might have privacy implications, you can test out resistance to it with a sheet of paper (or another free SurveyMonkey form). Another startup gave potential users a small notebook to see if they would write their thoughts during the day on a subject (which simulated a part of their upcoming product).

Figure out what's most risky in your new venture, then find a way of cheaply testing it so you can reduce the risk. Feel free to discuss in the comments, or email me if you have questions -- tim @ cloudspace.com