Quick, dirty, cheap
A look at the Prototyping phase of the Business Design process
Note: The following is the third in a four-part series detailing the phases of NEXT’s Business Design process, which takes teams of innovators from an initial insight to a fully-fledged business case.
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” — Thomas Edison
The Prototyping phase is all about the user. Teams will “think with their hands” to bring their concept to life. Using a tangible version of their Solution/Value Proposition created during the Visioning phase, they will analyze user testing, gather feedback, and improve their Solution.
Hopefully, you’ll fail
Iterative trial, feedback, and adaptation are key in the Prototyping phase, which means quick, dirty, and cheap is the way to go. This will allow you to fail at next to no cost, financially or otherwise. Try to celebrate your failures, if at all possible — think of them as discoveries regarding ways to improve your concept.
While Prototyping, teams will also pull in users and experts early and often, seeking advice and feedback. The trick here is not to get defensive — instead, simply listen, taking in as much as you can and using that information to refine your Solution/Value Proposition.
More than 5 Design Tasks are available during Prototyping, such as:
- Scale Modeling — Build a simple physical representation of the idea for feedback and improvement.
- Storyboarding — Sketch the user experience for feedback and improvement.
- Role Playing — Enact your Value Proposition to elicit user feedback.
- Look Before You Leap — revisit your key assumptions to further strenghten your Solution/Value Proposition.
It’s alive!
The end of the Prototyping phase will, obviously, see teams with a finished prototype of their solution, which can be published to the Business Canvas. Depending on the tangibility of a team’s particular project, this prototype will be either a model or a sketch. Regardless, it will provide teams with the feedback they need to improve and polish their Solution/Value Proposition as they move into the final phase of the Business Design process.
Having user-tested their prototype, teams will now have all the information needed to truly understand the desirability of their product.
Stay tuned for next week’s entry to the “Business Design process” series: Scaling.
Contributing editor: Adam Kohut
