Step 5 — Prototyping (Part 1)

Blog 7/10

Cast your mind back to childhood, lost in the joy of building a Lego set, doll house or Meccano car. Remember the sense of achievement from building something you could see and feel. Fast forward a few years to the prototyping phase of our project for the same sensation. We whittled our 100+ ideas from our brainstorm to the best few. And now had to bring them to life. Armed with playdough, Lego, stickers, magnets and a host of other materials, we set out prototyping.

We did this in three stages;

1. Rapid storyboarding

2. Building (literally) our idea

3. Test, iterate, test, iterate

Storyboarding.

We got together and split into two teams to tackle different ideas. The brief? Storyboard the idea, think of where risks lie, and make it better. Importantly, our other challenge was to do this without using technology as a solution. Our ideas need to be human-centric, and if we use technology it’s to enhance rather than be the main solution. After storyboarding the first idea in a limited time, we needed to go back through and spot where there could be implementation challenges; how would people access it? Are we assuming managers would be on board? Is this too narrow for what people want? With all these questions in mind, we’d re-storyboard, considering the challenges we’d found and how we would work around or through them.

Building.

Storyboarding is a great way to get a quick understanding of how our ideas might work. But we needed to go deeper. Working out how it would interact with users and whether it could really work in our environment. Armed, with Lego, playdough and other crafty items we got creative, messy and hands-on. It’s amazing when you start to play with these materials, you’re transported back to childhood and the imagination starts running wild. Practically building ideas out also helps you see rapidly which bits work, and which we’d need to re-think.

Test, iterate, test, iterate.

Moving into a test and iterate period — we tested our ideas with people who have been involved in the journey so far, people who’ll be future customers of the solution, people outside our organisation and our friends and family who could offer us a different perspective. A mixture of photos and videos walking through our prototypes were uploaded to Sprintbase, and we sent links to our testers for some very honest feedback and further thoughts. And why? When time is money, testing concepts with real users early and often is your best bet. It’s much safer than taking the fast track straight to a mass rollout only to realise its numerous flaws could have been avoided, if only you discovered them earlier…

We hit a bit of a roadblock. We’d started testing and weren’t getting the volume of feedback we needed (or had expected) to be able to evolve our prototypes. That and our other workstacks were starting to pile up and couldn’t dedicate the time we’d hoped to this stage. We reached out to El, our coach from Treehouse, asking for help. How we could look past what was in front of us and if I’m honest, we were looking to re-energise. After a quick check-in call we were back on track. In our next blog we’ll be sharing how we reiterated our ideas based on real feedback so we could test some more.