manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a r ...

and

design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...

, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or

full-size Full-size car—also known as large car—is a vehicle size class which originated in the United States and is used for cars larger than mid-size cars, it is the largest size class for cars. In Europe, it is known as E-segment or F-segment. Af ...

model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup may be a ''

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...

'' if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design. Mock-ups are used by designers mainly to acquire feedback from users. Mock-ups address the idea captured in a popular engineering one-liner: "You can fix it now on the drafting board with an eraser or you can fix it later on the construction site with a sledge hammer".

Applications

Mockups are used as

design tool Design tools are objects, media, or computer programs, which can be used to design. They may influence the process of production, expression and perception of design ideas and therefore need to be applied skillfully. Objects New ideas can come ...

s virtually everywhere a new product is designed. Boeing 2707 mock-up

Mockups are used in the automotive device industry as part of the product development process, where dimensions, overall impression, and shapes are tested in a

wind tunnel Wind tunnels are large tubes with air blowing through them which are used to replicate the interaction between air and an object flying through the air or moving along the ground. Researchers use wind tunnels to learn more about how an aircraft ...

experiment. They can also be used to test consumer reaction.

Systems engineering

Mockups, wireframes and prototypes are not so cleanly distinguished in

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

and

systems engineering Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their enterprise life cycle, life cycles. At its core, systems engineering util ...

, where mockups are a way of designing

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

s on paper or in computer images. A software mockup will thus look like the real thing, but will not do useful work beyond what the user sees. A software prototype, on the other hand, will look and work just like the real thing. In many cases it is best to design or prototype the user interface before

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

is written or hardware is built, to avoid having to go back and make expensive changes. Early layouts of a World Wide Web site or pages are often called ''mockups''. A large selection of

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