Prototyping

This past week we complete our first round of initial prototypes. Since, I have little experience with prototyping I was looking forward to trying a new approach. So far, most of my experience with prototyping has been limited to mostly surveys and interviews. In many ways I think that these are great tools to gain insight. The drawback that I have found is that it’s hard to create an environment of available people in a natural setting. The last few times I performed interviews was either online or catching people off guard in public.

In online interviews you have the challenge of objectively balancing your questions. A good interview anticipates the respondents answers sequentially, without leading them.

How do you do ask people what you want to know without asking what you want to know?

This is hard. It becomes even more challenging when you’re interviewing a wide range of people. This puts you into some kind of middle ground that doesn’t clearly define it’s extremes. In this case your results will often reflect the middle ground. In order to conduct an effective interview you have to establish a relationship through dialogue. This allows you to ask the appropriate follow up questions at the right time.

From this experience I realized that another technique should be tried. After talking with my team we decided to try card sorting. Our prototype required us to validate how people make decisions based on images. Card sorting provided the perfect low fidelity application. We made cards of images and organized them categorically. People were then asked to arrange them into groups of five based on specific concepts. During, the sorting I realized that people began to interact with others. They began to make comments out loud of why they making decisions. This provided a great opportunity to ask follow up questions. I noticed that through the activity of sorting cards people were able to create a context for the given task. They began to act intuitively and not over think the question.

Interviewing people is an art. It goes back to the question of… “How do you do ask people what you want to know without asking what you want to know?” I think the secret is to make people forget that they are in an interview.