Sprint Day 4: Putting the “Pro” in Prototype
Disclaimer: Medium forces its users to adhere to a very strict formatting style, so this post had to be altered from its original format. What used to be footnotes is in Italics at the bottom.
Thursday was prototype day. The day that we took all of the intellectual energy that had been collecting in that corner conference room and focused it into hot rays of piercing sunlight that bathed our team in the heat of inspiration and allowed the seeds of creation that had been lying dormant in each of us to germinate and burst forth into a mighty oak of a prototype (1). We were pressed for time and a little bit out of our element, but we did not let that stop us from putting together the best prototype eight hours and our collective abilities could produce (2).
Successful companies do not generally embrace concepts like “If you cannot actually deliver, fake it” and “We don’t need it to be good, just good enough,” but for a day they became mantras our team lived by (3). For a group with perfectionistic tendencies, this was harder than it should have been. Yet despite how it may sound, there are actually good reasons for adopting this approach. First, putting a lot of time and resources into the wrong thing stinks (4), and second, the more time you spend on something, the more attached to it you become (and the harder it is to hear and internalize constructive feedback) (5).
Of course, that did not mean that we could build something terrible. If you have a good idea but implement it poorly, people will focus on the implementation, and the idea will be lost. So that was our challenge: build a prototype that allows people to react to the concepts we were testing, and do it in eight hours (6). We chose pie as our theme. Because everybody likes pie (7).
We all had different jobs: two makers built the framework for the prototype, a couple of writers provided any text that was needed, the interviewer, who we exiled for the day (8), put the interview script together, and the asset collector trolled the internet for logos, photos, and whatever else the makers desired. We built it all in Moqups (9), which presented its own set of challenges, but by the end of the day we were all pleasantly surprised with the result.
As a unit we overcame a diverse set of problems including a name dispute, general lack of familiarity with our chosen tool, a fairly last-minute architecture change that affected every page we had already built, and the acting out of a disgruntled writer (10). I think we all wished we could have had a little bit more time to work on it, but as our fearless leader pointed out, that was kind of the point. By limiting the amount of time we spent on it, we really had to focus on the concepts instead of the UX specifics. Overall, we came out with a workable prototype that set us up to glean valuable insights from the coming interviews (11).
(1) I recognize that this is a terrible metaphor, but I spent too much time writing it to scrap it, so I am sticking with it.
(2) It may not have actually been the BEST prototype we could produce, but it was workable.
(3) Interestingly enough, my ex-girlfriend Karen embraced the first maxim, while I, after a soul-crushing string of failed relationships, have been forced to adopt the the second… but you didn’t come here for an in-depth analysis of my love life. Back to the topic at hand.
(4) RIP Betamax, HD DVD, and all the early adopters who chose poorly.
(5) see note 1 above
(6) I realize that sentence was annoyingly vague and uninformative, but all members of the innovation team were forced to make an unbreakable vow that they wouldn’t reveal company secrets (a la Harry Potter) and if I say anything else about what we were actually working on, I will die a painful, magical death.
(7) More accurately: Almost everybody likes pie. One member of the team actually objected to the choice on the basis of, “why would I eat pie when I can eat a piece of fruit?” His life goal is also to become the youngest docent to ever work at the NASA museum, so, naturally, we overruled him. He has since recanted his position.
(8) We intentionally kept him out of the prototype-building process so he could honestly tell whomever we were interviewing, “Don’t worry about offending me if you hate the prototype, I didn’t build it, I kinda hate it too.” Technically true, but really a lie, since he was part of the story-boarding process that the prototype was built from.
(9) Our other option was PowerPoint, and it just didn’t seem sexy enough. There’s something inherently sexy about replacing a dull, ordinary “ck” with a wild and crazy “q.”
(10) Full-disclosure: I was the disgruntled writer. The team kept cutting all of my pie puns. I tried to lattice them into the text throughout the prototype, but the team felt like it wasn’t fruitful to bake that much humor into it and ended up slicing out most of what I did.
(11) Spoiler Alert: we gleaned valuable insights from the coming interviews.
