Have You Tested These Things In Your Prototype?
You have your first physical prototype, now what?
Building a physical prototype is an investment, so as with any investment, you want to get the most out of it.
If you are buying a stock, you wouldn’t buy it, have a quick look for a couple of days to see how it is doing then forget about it. Unfortunately, with prototypes that’s what usually happens.
The best way to get the most return from a prototype starts by preparing your strategy.
Choose the right goal
Decide what goal you want to achieve with the prototype, what do you want to validate with it. That will help you define a list of tests to be performed.
List beforehand the main tests that you will be doing, what will you need to test and to check in your prototype to confirm that the goal is achieved.
Consider what you can and can’t do with the prototype so you have realistic expectations about the tests you will perform. Then define criteria, with a specific value that can be measured if possible, that will help you decide.
I have explained how to plan for your prototype in more detail in the following article.
Once you have a rough plan, let’s see what would be the essential tests that you should perform in your prototype so that you can get the most return on your investment.
Users’ Feedback
Feedback from users is crucial and should be done frequently during development. Use any initial prototypes and early samples to get users to test the product and find issues and potential improvements early on.
People tend not to show early prototypes to users. They are afraid of getting negative feedback due to the prototype not being 100% complete and missing many features.
That is a way too common mistake.
First of all, your prototype should have a clear goal and, especially for earlier versions, it should barely deliver the single most important feature, the unique value that your product is offering.
Second, do not take certain feedback simply as negative, just think of it as a useful insight that will let you save time and effort in the wrong direction and will help you deliver a better product in the end.
How desirable is your product?
One of the benefits of having a physical prototype is that in most cases you can show a quite accurate representation of your final product’s appearance.
Use it to test the desirability of your product, discover which emotions provoke in the user. For the majority, aesthetics is one of the key elements of a successful product. Very few products will not consider appearance as an important factor.
How users interact with your product?
Usability and ergonomics are also something important to check early on with prototypes. Basic user tests where you just observe the users can really tell you a great deal about how they will use your product.
It is extremely hard to predict user behavior no matter how good you think you know. Users are unpredictable and they will interact with your products in ways you never expected. Don’t wait until you have a finished product to discover that.
Performance
Will your product be exposed to water? Or too high temperatures? How many times does it need to switch on/off during its lifetime? All of the above are potential requirements for your product. Those requirements are verified and validated through test methods.
What're your criteria?
As mentioned earlier, it is important that you have defined a basic criteria so you can decide whether a test has achieved your goal or not.
With performance testing, you will mostly work with quantitative results, so you should be able to define target values for your tests. Some kinds of performance tests consider endurance and environmental exposure.
Endurance testing covers extreme situations to which the product might be exposed during its life, such as drops from a certain height, transportation vibration, and shocks, product robustness, etc..
Environmental testing covers resilience of the product to environmental conditions such as operational use temperatures and humidity, sunlight exposure, water and dust protection, salt corrosion,…
Due to certain limitations of prototypes, some of these performance testings might not be all that accurate to predict the behavior of the final product which might use completely different materials. More on that in the following article.
However, it is important to at least perform some of these tests and get a baseline and a rough idea of where you are at with these initial prototypes.
Use simple and informal methods to perform those tests. For earlier prototypes, getting some usable data is better than having the most accurate results, so look at ways of simplifying the tests.
Costs
Lastly, you should consider the product’s costs, not so much of the prototypes but of the final product. With physical prototypes, you can already estimate the number of components needed, production processes required and the quality finish.
All of that information would be enough to start estimating the costs of your Bill of Materials (BOM). With that, you can calculate the unit cost of your product and also the investment required for production tooling and equipment.
Calculate your margin
If you know your costs, then you can decide what is the sale price you can set for your product. At least you should know if your intended sale price covers the costs of the product, but you will also want to have a margin.
By performing this check, you can also decide where you should focus your efforts to reduce the costs of certain components in case you need a lower sale price for your product. In any case, having clarity of the overall costs early on is crucial.
Continuous Testing
Product testing doesn’t have to be complicated to start with and it helps to have a plan and a clear direction beforehand. It will allow you to quickly evaluate the status of your product and make adjustments early on.
Waiting until the end of the development to test your product only to find that you fail some requirements or you built the wrong product for your user is a really bad idea.
Testing should be done continuously through the development, it is the way you can understand and improve your product constantly until you build the right product.
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Abilista guides innovators to develop their product ideas from concept, prototyping and all the way to manufacturing following our own step by step framework. We are already helping several entrepreneurs and startups to build their ideas by giving them access to simple and agile tools and expertise on-demand.
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