Turns out we had been doing it all along
With the help of Power 2 Change and the support of CAST, we, and my peers who embarked on a journey of Discovery back in October, have been getting to grips with prototyping.
One of my concerns/challenges was the number of Users I could currently access to prototype with. I was heartened to discover that with only 5 you will get a really good amount of useful feedback. You get lots of new feedback from the first person, a reasonable amount of new (and quite a bit of overlap) from the 2nd and with the 3rd it is mainly what you have heard before with a few new insights, etc. I therefore decided to not worry about my low number of Users to act as testers. If my initial User Research from Phase 1 was anything to go by, I was confident I would be getting feedback from the two extremes and everything in between.
Whilst trying to steer our testers away from what specific shade of yellow we should use, or indeed even if we should be using yellow, I tried not to tell them the “story” of our paper prototype. I discovered that this prototype did not appear real enough for them to naturally follow the possible actions and responses. One of my peers on the programme also referred to a similar challenge in her week notes. She had displayed what she thought was the solution prototype in a clear format of a spreadsheet, only to find later, when there was a more “ real-world” front end form displayed, her colleagues/users happily and enthusiastically “got it” and admitted to not really having understood the solution before. Sometimes what can be clear in our own heads may not be to others. My need to provide the story through our paper prototype meant our solution, in this format, wasn’t clear and we weren’t get the best and, more importantly, uninfluenced feedback. (And yes, I did have to look in a dictionary to check that that was a not a made up word!)
I was chatting with one of our volunteers about how the whole project was progressing and about how we were trying to prototype some of the key ideas and solutions. I showed him my paper phone-screen mock-ups. I tried to explain that we were trying to avoid getting into the nitty gritty e.g. type face, box shape etc and that I was therefore struggling to know where to go next. I just couldn’t see how to make amendments to re-test without them being just a test of the nitty gritty.
He very helpfully pointed out that part of the reason was because we had already done some of the earlier prototyping without really realising and we were probably a bit ahead of where I imagined we were in the prototyping pathway.
I have created numerous reiterations of solutions to various parts of our problem solution and just not realised it. I have created a variety of different formats of table to record some of the data, utilised cards which you can move about and attach with blue tac, and morphed word documents into user-completed google forms. Having always listened to User feedback about these iterations, before adapting them, I have in fact been doing early stage prototyping.
It also explained why, when doing our user research with Users and staff, I was not at all surprised by any of the findings.
So, what is the next stage, well a very excited colleague is becoming a whizz at using Figma and creating something a little more realistic than my paper phone-screen mock-ups. We will then test again. It turns out I quite like prototyping.
