In Praise of Ultra-Low-Fidelity Prototyping

Oh, Ultra-Low-Fidelity Prototype, how I love thee, in all thy junky glory!

We love our minimum viable products, our scale models, our proofs of concept,even our lowly paper prototypes. They are wonderful and important. But they are not everything.

Ultra-Low Fi Pro, you are ugly, you are dirt cheap, you require an effort-investment of approximately zilch. You are created in seconds or minutes out of the most homely of materials, held together with sticky tape and storytelling.

And yet — You engage the most cynical user, the most intimidating customer, the most indifferent colleague! …

This afternoon, I was logging a receipt in my financial tool and — Hey look! The invoice icon reminded me that I had an invoice to create. So I jumped to email to find the client’s email address, and — Hey look! A new email! And — Hey look! It’s notification of a social network message! And — Hey look! My friend sent an article! And — Hey look! The article has links!

Wait. What was I supposed to be doing? Oh yeah. Logging a receipt.

It’s like I go into my toolbox for a wrench and the hammer says…

For years, I’ve been telling people to get out of their comfort zones, sending them out into the streets of San Jose or Sydney or Raleigh to talk to strangers about a challenge. Recently someone led me to a new insight that hit me hard: comfort zones come in different sizes! For some people, the idea of talking to strangers is absolutely ordinary and relaxing — deep in the safety of the comfort zone. For others, talking to a new person requires so much psychological energy that there’s nothing to spare for learning.

In design thinking and lean startup bootcamps…

I’ve heard some version of this story over and over again in my discovery interviews with potential clients:

“I hired the number one student from <internationally famous university> into <high-responsibility role> and the guy keeps asking me what he should be doing! I need him to figure out what to do, I can’t hold his hand all day long! He can’t make a decision to save his life. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him.”

In each case, the executive telling me this story sounds terribly surprised. After all, the top student from a top University should…

In his article The Perils of Empathy, Paul Bloom characterizes empathy as “a moral train wreck” that “makes the world worse.” We tend to empathize with the saddest and most familiar story, abandoning reason. He asserts that we’d be much better people if we used reason and compassion as an alternative to empathy. Could Bloom be correct?

Empathy is an inherent cognitive function — we are able to feel the pain of others as if it were our own. We’re also able to feel their hunger, joy, lust, itchiness, rage … In fact, in general we’re unable to avoid feeling…

I love this simple tool that draws together Desirability, Viability and Feasibility. I learned about it from IDEO and Lime Design a few years ago, and I see everywhere on the ‘net these days. The DVF framework, well exploited, is incredibly powerful for innovators looking for a product at the intersection of (D) constituents’ deep needs, (V), a sustainable business model, and (F), what the team can achieve. I use all the time when I coach innovators and run incubators. It can provide a sense of direction for entrepreneurs. …

Well, I’ve gone and done it now. I gave up a lovely, fun, interesting job working with terrific colleagues for a great leader in a mission-driven company. To be an entrepreneur. Bye-bye benefits, bye-bye corporate IT department, bye-bye routine.

Why am I doing this to myself?

Reason number one: I’m itchy — I have a burning question I need to scratch. I can either be uncomfortable because (a) being an entrepreneur comes with lots of uncertainty, or (b) I can be uncomfortable because my job and my burning curiosity don’t match. There’s nothing wrong with (b), but I’m picking (a).

…

Illustrations by @schhen. Captions on the left are clickable.