Prototypes for need finding and problem exploration in digital innovation projects
In the area of digital transformation a lot of companies are faced with digital innovation projects. As a consequence, people with competences in computer science and software development are getting more and more involved in the fuzzy front end of innovation. At the same, we see a clear shift of design and development processes towards short iteration cycles of ideation, prototyping/developing and testing as lean startup practices and design thinking and agile methods are becoming more and more popular. Hence, cycles of iteration and prototyping become an established procedure in industries settings. Nevertheless, digital projects use prototyping mainly to evaluate functional feasibility (vertical prototyping) or to user interface decision (horizontal prototyping). Prototyping is less known as a method for need finding and understanding the problem context especially valuable in innovation projects, where the context needs to be investigated and hidden needs of users are seen as a potential for innovation.
I will dig on prototyping as an exploration method by introducing three different tools/methods of prototyping and elaborate how prototyping can further speed up the learning curve in early stages while exploring the problem space. Hopefully, this inspires you to rethink your prototyping practice and enlarges your prototyping activities in future projects.
1. Background and context of our prototyping experience
My experience on prototyping evolved through a long career as a computer scientist, usability professional, interaction designer out in industry and enriched through my job as professor, being in the lucky position of coaching students in digital innovation projects. Our students work in design thinking projects with companies for 9 month (2 semesters). In the projects, 4–5 students from different disciplines group with partner universities to work on real world problems given by companies. During these projects we follow the design thinking approach according to Stanford’s Professor Larry Leifer as established in the ME310 program. In the projects, we tackle wicked and ambiguous problems and spend a significant amount of the project time in exploring the problem space with the goal to reframe the given challenges. This phase serves as a source of inspiration to what the final solution will be for the problem given by the company. In the following, I want to share some of the learnings we made, while accompanying our students on their adventure of innovation. (learn more about us here: www.inno-space.de)
This program puts a lot of emphasis on tangible prototypes as manifestations of ideas. In our intense master programs, students built up to 20 different prototypes until they finally reframe and decide which direction the project will take and build the product as a proof of concept. This distinguishes our projects from many other design thinking approaches I came across in industry, which might end after ideating on Post-its. Also, our various projects are very diverse, e.g. this year one group works on the topic of future of mobility, whereas others work on circular economy and on digitalization of graveyards. As a consequence, the prototypes are very different in terms of focus and material, they might address service design as well as smart products or mobile apps. This continuously challenges our prototyping skills and allowed us to gain a lot of experience in prototyping methods and tools. In our projects we see prototyping as a tool to accelerate our learning, so different prototypes are used to explore different potential project directions. We use the prototypes not only to evaluate ideas but also to learn about the user and its context.
As the term prototype in academia and industry has many different definitions and meanings, I’ll introduce some definitions first to avoid misunderstandings.
2. What is a prototype?
In our understanding prototypes are an artifact. They are simplified representations of products. We resonate with a definition given by Lim et al 2018: “prototypes are filters that traverse a design space and are manifestations of design ideas that concretize and externalize conceptual ideas.“ These products, in our case, can be services that include a software, they can be smart objects that have a digital and physical representations, or they can be purely digital, as we are always involved in digital innovation projects. Our understanding of the term prototype is very broad and it can range from scribbles, films, acted out role plays and 3D models to tangible artifacts built out of wood, cardboard, or including hardware elements like Arduinos, depending on what we want to achieve.
3. What is the design space?
The double diamond published by the Design Council serves a valuable model for describing the different phases of design processes. As our approach is user centered, our innovation projects can be seen as design processes. The double diamond consists of four phases, each of them with different impact on the usage of prototypes. The model builds upon the assumption that the design of a product is manifested in a specific design space. This includes all knowledge about the problem and possible solutions. As such, the design space can be further separated in the problem space and the solution space, each of them defining one diamond in the model. Furthermore, the double diamond distinguishes divergent and convergent activities. Divergent activities open the design space by gaining new knowledge and showing alternatives. In contrast, convergent activities like synthesis and decision making narrow the design space.
The double diamond as shown in the figure distinguishes the following four phases. Prototyping plays a very different role depending of the phase:
Discover: This phase begins with a open statement on the problem, like for example “how can we improve the experience of the last mile delivery”. During this phase, knowledge and insights about the user (in this case this could be parcel delivery people as well as parcel recipients) is collected and the context and the stakeholders is explored. Here prototypes are built with the purpose of learning about the user and its context. This emphasizes the fact that the prototype is mainly an instrument to learn and a medium to get engaged in deeper conversations with users. In this phase prototypes are built to “be thrown away”.
Define: During this phase the gained knowledge is filtered and analyzed. At the end of the phase the design opportunity is defined. In design thinking this is also known as „Point of View.“ It is a very important point in the process of design innovation, because at that point companies often decide about the future of the project and its further direction. Coming back to the example above. The Point of View at the end of this phase can be “How can we support the parcel delivery user to avoid unsuccessful delivery attempts?”. Here Prototypes are built to validate assumptions and compare alternative ideas in terms of feasibility and user experience. They are also made with the purpose of idea communication to the decision makers.
Develop: In this phase possible solutions for the design opportunity are explored. The design is further refined. Prototypes are used to explore and evaluate alternative design decisions within a defined solution space referring to the design opportunity.
Deliver: The last phase brings the product to the market. In this phase, evolutionary prototypes are built for the purpose of evaluation. Prototypes are already built in the material of the final product.
Reflecting the phase of your project helps you to be aware how you are dealing with your prototype and helps you to rethink your fixation on the idea represented by the prototype. When are you building prototypes? When doing so are you still open enough to give up on your idea and are you using the prototype as a means to learn or discuss with our colleagues? This leads to a next question.
4. What is the purpose of your prototyping activity?
This refers to: Why are we building the prototype at all? What do you want to achieve with the prototype? In my research projects I came across several companies that did not question their prototyping practice. They did the wireframe because they always did it. But in fact, building a prototype is an effort, so it should always be done with a question behind, so you can achieve your goal.
According to the literature, each prototyping effort fits to at least one of the three following goals: Exploration, evaluation and/or communication (Blomkvist & Holmlid, 2011; Houde & Hill, 1997). This goal has implications on the choice of the prototyping method or tool. Are you building it to find out if your customer would use this kind of service? (purpose of evaluation) or do you want to discuss and explore in your team the variety of options you see in the project? (purpose of exploration). Or do you want to present our idea to a sponsor in order to get a go- or no-go- decision? Also, if you are building it for the purpose of evaluation, it is important to consider the details of your evaluation question. Because the material you choose for prototyping has influence on the feedback user will give you. If you want to convince a sponsor of the idea you need to get the big picture right, so a film might be the right prototype to represent the idea, whereas, if you evaluate usability, the end user should be able to interact with the prototype, or at least you need to be able to walk them through a visual representation of the product.
I provide three examples of prototypes created in our student projects that show the variety of prototypes and how they can be used for exploration.
Example — Interactive Scribbles
Figure 1 shows scribbles that were turned in the prototyping tool POP. This tool turns hand made sketches in an interactive prototype of your app running on a smart phone. The app with the name “parcel surfing” allows users to get in touch and define the preferred person to hand over the parcel if they are not at home. The idea was rough and sketchy, but good enough to walk end users through the prototype and engage in a deeper conversation in order to find out more about their needs. By doing so the team gained important information about the struggles people have with their parcel delivery in their daily life. The team learned about the desire to block “certain people” to take their parcel and also of their concern, that one can judge from the parcel what is inside, which might be connected to a privacy issue. This prototype was very low in material and effort, well knowing, that this might not become the final design direction, but still rich enough to learn about the context.
It was built in the “define” phase and with the purpose to evaluate assumptions about users pains and fears. It took the team less then 2 h to come up with it and they showed it to the target user group.
Example — A concept film made with SAP scenes
The figure shows a prototype that was created in the same project. It represents the idea of a cloud based service that allows the delivery guy to know the time span the receiver might be at home, so the parcel could be delivered successfully. The delivery also gets instant notification when a receiver left the destination, so he might skip that address during the tour short noticed. This prototype resulted in a film made with SAP scenes.
SAP scenes are a free to download set of templates especially well suited to ‘’play’’ the intended user journey. Scenes were cut out of paper and enriched with hand drawn annotations to explain the service. As this prototype was used in a meeting with the project sponsor that should lead to a decision about the future direction of the product (purpose communication, end of define phase), the story was filmed and cut in a 2 min video explaining the concept. Cutting and coloring the Scenes was less time consuming (2 h), whereas creating the stop motion film demanded one additional day of effort including synchronizing it with spoken language. Using the scenes made is very easy for the team to add additional symbols like for example, the parcel itself, that were missing in the templates. Scenes allow to easily expand the elements of the play due to its material. This makes it much more convenient to us compared to Lego serious play, which could be used for the same purpose.
Example — Role Play
This figure shows the enactment of a role play. In a role play one or several team members act like a user in a particular usage situation of the future product, that does not exist yet. Therefore, the team develops empathy for the user and explores the effectiveness of a prototype during this interaction. At the same time the team can detail out the idea and detects pitfalls and open issues.
Here we acted out the idea to improve the return process in parcel delivery by guiding the workers in the warehouse with augmented reality through the quality check of the returned item. The team was ideating on ways to make workers in warehouses more efficient. The Hololese shown in the picture should automatically identify the product and displays the information needed to guide through the quality check procedure. Here the role play was a way to ideate the details of this interaction before starting the implementation, as prototyping tools for AR are not existing yet. Prototyping the next level of details can be of very high effort, which we wanted to avoid. This prototype was built in the “define” phase and was built with the purpose to exploration. It took the team less then 1 h.
In summary, these examples exemplify a wide variety of prototypes in early stages of digital innovation projects (problem space = left diamond) that go beyond the well established tools to create wireframes. All methods are lightweight and do not need special tool skills. They can be created very quickly, which allows teams to fail fast to succed sooner. It prevents the team from an early solution fixation and therefore opens the room for creativity and further exploration. The shown examples also emphasize that considering the purpose and phase of the project can be helpful to decide about the right prototyping approach, which still requires experience.
