“Pretotyping” with a block of wood!
“I am inevitable”
— Failure in innovation
This is perhaps the truest and the most significant statement in terms of design, more so in the phase of prototyping. Innovation is a very risky process and it is vital that we take failures into our stride. The ratio of good to bad failures should be quite high in the first place because the vast majority of products and services will inevitably fail. Building, testing, debugging and finalising are some of the main boxes that need to be checked in green for the prototyping to work.
But as you may have noticed, the first word of the title isn’t “prototyping”. So…
What is “pretotyping”?
For any service or product that is innovative and will possible be designed and developed for the first time ever, what pretotyping as an art and a science urges you to do, is to fake it before you make it. Many a times big teams spend significantly large quantities of time, energy and expense into making something, only to realise that users never wanted or needed it at all — what they had developed was wrong.
But had the same product failed fast and failed cheaply, the teams would have had plenty of resources left to restart from scratch. Time, energy and resources would be abundant for multiple trials and errors before narrowing down on the best and, more importantly, the right product. This is where pretotyping comes into play. A pretotype is thus a pretend-prototype — a partial mockup of the desired final product, developed and launched to make sure that failures would be fast and cheap, thus allowing you to move on swiftly.
Differences between prototyping and pretotyping can be visualised clearly when taking into account the main purposes of each.
Prototyping answers questions like:
• can it be built?
• if yes, how cheap and efficient?
• will it serve the purpose it is being built for?
…
while, pretotyping looks at the process from a different perspective, trying to answer questions like:
• would our “target users” buy it?
• if yes, would they use it?
• would I buy it?
So as you might understand from the above set of questions, prototyping is more time-, resource- and energy-demanding than pretotyping in most cases. However there is no fine line of distinction between prototyping and pretotyping, they overlap significantly and so, it is crucial to understand the implications for using either or both, depending on the product or service.
Familiar with the concept of using non-functional dummy components to understand whether they will be received well by users? No? Read on!
The pocketed block of wood!
if you are new to the field of usability research studies, let me reaffirm the heading above — a block of wood was pocketed for days to see the effect it would have on people carrying electronic gadgets of similar shape and weight on themselves (mostly in their pockets).
In 1997, the Palm Pilot was launched by Palm Incorporation — their first ever product. And it was a great success, to say the least. Jeff Hawkins was Palm co-founder and an excellent innovator, and it was he who first had the idea of the Pilot — a pocket sized Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), and wanted to get his assumptions about the public acceptance of his device, validated. And to that effect, he had a block of wood, similar in size to that of the actual device, that had paper sheets attached up top to simulate the screen options and a mini-chopstick of sorts chiselled into the shape of a stylus. And he would carry this entire paraphernalia in his pocket for quite a few weeks. Seems crazy?
The main aim of this experiment was to decide whether he himself would want to use the product extensively each and every day. People in those days weren’t familiar with 6+ inch electronic gadgets in their pockets that they would pull out every few minutes to get updates or add reminders and the like. What he intended to find out as a result was to collect valuable data on usability. He found out for himself that the four main features of the device to-be, namely Address Book, Memo, Calendar and To-do Lists were being used extensively by him in his daily activities (on the dummy wooden block of course). And he decided to proceed with the project and got the Palm Pilot designed, developed and crafted into one of the most popular and successful PDA’s. And all of a sudden the experiment does not seem so crazy after all!
Bodystorming?!
That’s a new term!
Well, not really.
It’s like brainstorming — for the body! And this is what Hawkins has made use of using the Palm Pilot. The dynamic overlapping zones between the digital and the physical space were the breeding grounds for the formative field study on mobile media design, carried out by Brett Oppegaard and Brian Still in their 2013 Mobile Media & Communication chapter, “Bodystorming with Hawkins’s block”.
This new methodology could be very useful for mobile media designers to understand the generative techniques for prototyping that Hawkins evangelised. Simply put, this form of study would help to externalise and understand from the perspectives of users, what the potential of such media could possibly be.
The main takeaways
In almost all cases of product design and development it is good practise to first look into whether there is a scope for pretotyping in the first place, and to understand what could be learnt from the process. Only then would it be fruitful to build a pretotype.
The final take-aways lie in the core beliefs and principles behind this process altogether. The main aim of pretotyping after all is to make sure that instead of building the product wrong, you do not end up building the wrong product. The same mistake is not to be made twice, of misunderstanding — not whether the users would need a specific feature — but whether they would actually come back to use it much, later down the lifecycle of the product. Last but not the least, the creativity of the innovator is put to play — it is upto her imaginative capabilities to make sure that she can pretend that the prototype is out and ready, and it is upto her, yet again, to pretend that she is using the exact product, but with just a prop.
“Pretend-prototype”— that is what pretotyping is at the root.
The two most important things to keep in mind when starting off down the track of product design for any new product, are user experience and the functionality of the product. It again boils down to the usability and desirability (and not usability “versus” desirability). And from this point onwards, the product is to be designed backward. This is the main reason, Hawkins would almost play with wooden blocks kept in his pocket to try to understand what users would feel and use the Palm Pilot.
One might have the craziest specifications in an electronic device and make it the most futuristic of the lot — that too at a “flagship-killer” price. But, if the device itself weighs you down, hurts your palms if you hold it and looks awkward when in your pocket, users will wince at it’s name.
In the words of Hawkins himself, “To heck with specs … people thought I was crazy … but I got a feel for how it would work”.
Be like Jeff Hawkins.
Speaking of design, are you new to this domain? Or are you a seasoned pro? Regardless, it would mean very little if you do not have your basics set right, correct? Here are quick items that you should brush up on, or get acquainted with, to make sure that your foundation is rock solid!
Cheers!
