How Early Prototyping Helps Create Better Experiences
What’s in a box? A disappointing customer experience
Last Christmas, I went to a department store to buy a box for the cookies I intended to make. You might think, what? Christmas? In August? Well, yes. My daughter is already counting the days until Christmas, and she’s not alone. At the end of the month, the first Christmas-related items will start appearing in the supermarkets all over Germany. The holiday season is around the corner, believe me.
Ok, back to the story. I was in the department store looking for cookie boxes, but couldn’t find them, so I asked an assistant for help. She walked me to a shelf close to the back and said, “that’s not all though, we also have some boxes at the front of the store”.
When I asked why the boxes were in two completely different places, nowhere near one another, she explained that the boxes at the back were owned by their store and would be brought back to the warehouse after Christmas, while the boxes at the front were from an external vendor who would take them back after the holiday season.
Frankly, I was irritated. As a customer, I expected to see all the boxes displayed next to each other so I could compare and find the most suitable one for my needs. I didn’t want or need to see how the store was set up and operated. To me, this showed me that the department store prioritized their own utilitarian needs over my own shopping experience.
Prototyping towards a better experience
How can we, as teams who create digital products, make sure we are putting our customers first and creating experiences based around their needs and wants, and not our own?
As Tom Greever says in his book Articulating Design Decisions, “UXers spend a lot of time putting sticky notes on the wall, discussing the right way to guide a user through the application, and then flesh those out in a series of static mock-ups. Often, what seems to make sense on the wall of a conference room has a very different feel when you are holding it in your hand.”
If there is a dissonance between what we create and what customers expect to find, chances are that we are skipping one of the most important steps in the design process: prototyping.
Prototyping means creating a tangible simulation of the experience you have in mind in order to gather feedback (internal and external) to further inform the design process.
Early prototyping helps us switch from a creative mindset (that we experience during the design process) into an analytical and reflective state so we can check our work for logic, consistency, cohesion, completeness, intuitiveness, language, and usability. It also provides a good opportunity to check our designs against user needs identified in the discovery phase.
There is a misconception that prototyping is only necessary for usability testing, but it can be extremely powerful and impactful even before that. It can help teams to change perspectives, center ourselves around experiences and stories (instead of functions and features) and ultimately create products that feel natural and are easy to use.
How to get the most out of prototyping
Over the last few years as a practicing user researcher I helped many teams to become more-user centric and this is my advice to them:
- Whenever you can, create a clickable prototype. That way, you can go through the interaction flow for yourself and see how it feels. Is there something that does not feel natural? That sounds like an opportunity for improvement. Adapt and check how it feels again.
- As a UX person take the lead, actively include the whole team and center them around what your design is trying to achieve. Encourage your team to interact with the flow of the experience they are planning to deliver. It will help the team to move away from consuming designs in a presentation mode, encouraging them to be active and engaged. The feedback will be more focused and constructive than if people (particularly non-designers) react on static screens.
- Collectively as a team decide where your biggest remaining uncertainties around the experience are, write them down and prioritize them for testing with end users later.
- When you are ready to test with end users make sure you are using the right methods to answer your remaining questions and validate the flow of your prototype. You can find really helpful guidance using these free User Research Method Cards.
Happy customers are the ones who feel listened to
Well, long story short, I ended up leaving empty-handed that day and later bought the perfect box at a certain Swedish furniture store. It was not even a Christmas box, but it was displayed beautifully and simply resonated with my intention, so I ended up buying it. And as I filled up the box up with our somewhat premature Christmas cookies, I thought about that famous quote by Frank Chimero: “People ignore design that ignores people”.
Thanks to Andrea Waisgluss for editing this text and Unsplash for the image.
