Prototype First, Then Listen
Most people design with the idea that they’ll “listen first, empathise, then design” — but in times of uncertainty, get building first.
The process of user-centred design, or design thinking, commonly starts with engaging one’s users to better understand their needs and ensure that whatever is designed in the end has those needs built-in.
However, the past few months have presented a global experiment to suggest that there are other (maybe better) ways to engage in the process of problem identification and solution. When the world went into shut down, a little over two months ago, businesses and schools had limited time to immerse themselves into their users’ needs — be they employees, customers, teachers, students or parents. There was no time to ideate an appropriate solution to service each of them and instead, they prototyped first and quickly iterated afterwards.
For a decade we’ve been saying “design thinking isn’t a linear process or repeating cycle”. This is what it means: you might read the situation quickly and then consider starting the design process with the prototype. Creating a product or service using a first-best-guess approach to solve a perceived (or known) problem and then using it to engage the user groups in feedforward as the mechanism to discover their needs, might lead to better solutions — faster. The success of this approach is predicated on two important elements, openness and agility: listening intently to the various ‘user’ groups is essential in ensuring the iterations are improving their situation and being able to swiftly implement the changes.
Dewey’s “Learning by Doing” idea of education suggests that the journey of discovery should begin by considering the environment and the nuance of engagement with users to develop a concrete outcome, rather than starting from a more theoretical position.
This idea was reinforced in 1961 in a paper by Kenneth J Arrow of Stanford University for the US Office of Naval Research, titled “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing” in which he writes, “it is the very activity of production which gives rise to problems for which favorable responses are selected over time.”
So instead of creating yet another plan, why not consider adopting a more agile strategy, where planning, not paperwork is something everyone gets involved with?
The Evidence
‘Prototype First, Then Listen’ is the nineteenth edition of ‘The Provocation’ series. You can sign-up to receive the latest episode directly to your inbox days before it is published online: https://mailchi.mp/notosh.com/the-provocation
