“As product designers, we make so many assumptions. We project how people will interact with our product. Instead, we should be building and testing prototypes with real users. They’ll bring insights to light that we never could’ve imagined.”
Background
Originally from Boston and Washington, DC, Alona Stern completed her BA at the University of Chicago, then worked at a nonprofit aimed at helping people find jobs before earning her MBA from MIT.
Alona’s early career included stints with a well-known futurist, strategic management consulting, and producing an international bicycle film festival.
She then turned to the world of manufacturing, working in Memphis, Tennessee for a steel fabrication company. Managing the implementation of a software system to improve operations, she saw the unanticipated challenges that users encountered and the difficulty in creating user-friendly products.
Since moving to Israel in 2011, Alona has worked for a number of software and hardware startups, guiding them in product management, marketing, and strategy. She came to realize the importance of bringing the methodologies of human-centered design thinking to Israel and has worked to apply these principles.
Freightos
Alona is currently working as a Senior Product Manager at Freightos, a startup powering online freight for global shippers and forwarders. At Freightos she’s able to combine her passion for product, strategy, and design.
Freightos is building an online marketplace for international freight services, a kind of ‘Expedia’ for freight. As Alona puts it, “it should be simple. Go online, compare prices and services, select, done.”
Try it (and test it) as you build it
Alona believes prototyping is key to creating great products and services and has taught different approaches to prototyping in a course on service design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. She says a fun and distinctive way to prototype is through the use of improv. Students working with different startups role-play through the use of a startup’s product. Using improv is a fast, cheap, and effective way to explore different scenarios, generate empathy for the users, and surface unexpected design flaws.
For example, one improv session focused on a voice recognition startup. The students chose a scenario in which the product was to be used in a car — one student played a user, another played a passenger in the car, and a third played the role of the product itself.
Alona wants to challenge the view that prototyping is too time consuming. It can be as simple as sketching on paper or as elaborate as building a fully-functioning test version of the product. Getting feedback from real users before finalizing the design can save countless hours and dollars.
She says “as product designers, we make so many assumptions. We project how people will interact with our product. Instead, we should be building and testing prototypes with real users. They’ll bring insights to light that we never could’ve imagined.”
Alona’s reading suggestions
“Badass: Making Users Awesome” by Kathy Sierra
“User story Mapping” by Jeff Patton
