Pretotyping
“Make sure you are building the right it before you built it right.”
The stages of design thinking provide a repeatable approach for building solutions that exceed client expectations. A big reason for this are the small iterative steps the process involves, relying on validated feedback from customers at each stage before progressing further. Rather than taking a bet on what is going to be useful, small experiments actually demonstrate exactly the usefulness and value of a solution — or not! No drama’s if a new iteratation is not as successful as anticipated, as you haven’t invested too much into this stage to unwind and try a new direction.
One concept I have come across that fits in between the Ideate and Prototype phase is the Pretotype phase — a concept developed by Alberto Savoia at Google.
Pretotyping is a set of tools, techniques, and tactics designed to help you validate any idea for a new product quickly, objectively, and accurately.
The goal with pretotyping is to help you make sure that you are building The Right It before you build It right. (pretotyping.org)
Savoia explains on the website pretotyping.org the difference between pretotyping and and the more common term prototyping:
The main objective of prototyping is to answer questions related to building the product. Can we build it? Will it work as expected? How cheaply can we build it? How fast can we make it?
The main objective of pretotyping is to answer questions about the product’s appeal and usage. Would people be interested in it? Will they use it as expected? Will they continue to use it?
Pretotyping encourages you to answer the following questions using your test designs (ref UXPlanet):
- Will user use it where they are? (Environment, context).
- Will users adapt in order to use it? (Behavior, switching).
- Will users use it if it looks like this? (Design, gestalt)
- Will users use it if it does/does not have X? (Functionality)
- Will users buy it this way? (Channel)
- Will users buy it if it costs more than X? (Price)
As with similar agile concepts such as the lean startup, the underlying premise with pretotyping is that you actually have very little idea about what is going to be successful or not and that you should validate ideas with as little effort as possible. Pretotyping identifies that you can actually come away with useful validation with even less effort than a prototype requires.
Savoia outlines the concepts for pretotyping in the free online E-Book
Principles
There are four key principles to follow when pretotyping(Savoia):
- Find the right it, before you build it right.
- Fake it before you make it to see if people will actually use/buy the product.
- Create rapid experiments to find the right it, then proceed to building it right, when customer data shows you that they want it and are willing to pay for it.
- Real prototypes are often too slow, Pretotypes should be quick and cheap.
Design tests
There are seven design tests that can be used to quickly and cheaply build a pretotype to provide valuable data. These include (Savoia):
- Mechanical turk — Replace complex machines with humans
- Pinocchio — Build a non-functional version of the product
- MVP — Create a functioning version, but strip it down to its core functionality
- The Provincial — Before launching world-wide, run a test on a very small sample.
- The Fake Door — Create a fake “entry” for a product that doesn’t yet exist in any form.
- The Pretend-to-Own — Before investing in buying whatever you need for your it, rent or borrow it first.
- The Re-label — Put a different label on an existing product that looks like the product you want to create.
Thinking about how to apply this in the workplace. An example relevant to me would be a new dashboard the team is looking to build — our hypothesis being that the creation of this dashboard would bring improvements to the business through providing our customers better data access. Whilst better data may indeed help improve the business a key assumption in this hypothesis is that stakeholder are going to click through to the dashboard in the first place. With pretotyping, rather than building out the dashboard fully to find this out, the first stage might be to use either the Pinocchio or Fake door concept and put a link to a non functional version of the proposed dashboard and check how many people actually click through to it. This simple action will potentially provide a wealth of data to validate your assumption and guide your next step. We have found through this process that simple things get highlighted that if not handled early might end up as major issues or roadblocks to the final product — for instance licensing restrictions which may me that your key stakeholders actually don’t even have the access or functionality that you assumed for the platform you are building the solution on.
Pretotyping Manifesto
Finally Savoia offers the following manifesto when it come to pretotyping:
- Innovators beats ideas
- Pretotypes beats productypes
- Data beats opinions
- Now beats later
- Doing beats talking
- Simple beats complex
- Commitments beat committees
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