How to prototype a service or product?
Introduction
Comuzi turned 6 years old last month! Hooray!
One facet we’ve always championed with our clients as a design innovation studio is that technology is an enabler and can be leveraged in collaboration with human beings as a service(s) to solve problems in new creative ways.
Technology clearly can’t address every issue in a standalone format. For example, if I ran and managed a Nigerian restaurant called Richy’s Joint (RJ) and the customer service deteriorated over a period of time, I could very easily find software speeding up operational processes like billing, but I’d still have to address the human/staffing issue affecting my level of service. (I’d genuinely love to open a restaurant as I’m a big fan of food, but that’s another discussion for another day!)
Five years ago we built & piloted a ‘Skype for healthcare platform’ called Vyzit Health allowing a patient to communicate via video remotely and securely with a GP or clinician. The concept was tested worldwide, from Harley Street, to Kenya & Pakistan, & was commended by the Department of Health. Vyzit was a great enabler of technology for communication between clinicians and patients, removing the need to travel or book a day off for an appointment that wouldn’t require a physical consultation, but as a standalone product , it couldn’t alleviate the soaring levels of demand for GP services which platforms such as Babylon Health and Push Doctor can better address (not free though & I don’t have official data on this), as they fuse video communication with clinicians and specialists on the other end.
Years later, we collaborated with Waltham Forest Council (WFC) in February 2019 to design a high impact service connecting disadvantaged young people to valuable opportunities, with the same approach of using technology as an enabler. We fused emerging technology with human connection, prototyping a seamless digital and physical service (currently confidential) that enabled young people to apply for opportunities based on their skill set rather than a CV and concepting a pop-up facility where young people could receive careers guidance, utilising the council’s underused space. The digital service we concepted is amazing for speeding up the application process for opportunities, but didn’t address the human needs of speaking to someone to plan an uncertain future, or identify skills beneficial for upcoming opportunities.
I’ll be talking about how we build service & product propositions, from start to finish, with our process called the Launchpad Programme. In case you’re reading this and don’t exactly know what we get up to at Comuzi this’ll be an insightful article. I’ll use our client projects where I’m not bound by confidentiality to provide credible examples along the way. Enjoy the ride!
Framing
Our first step when developing propositions is framing. This includes taking a deeper look at the original brief, defining success & failure, identifying the underlying issue to be addressed and poking assumptions that may have been made, so we can come up with a defined, objective challenge question that guides our thinking throughout the project.
In Jan 2019 we worked with Projects By If exploring how we could help young people understand automated decisions, the challenge question being ‘How can we expose the seams of a mental health chatbot to make its actions explainable’.
Time is also taken to understand organisational culture, structure and project goals in relation to strategic objectives. In the project with Waltham Forest Council, one of WFC’s objectives were ‘to improve the life chances of young people within their borough’. We were able to facilitate check-in sessions for councillors & high level stakeholders from different teams to keep track of the project and a ‘parking lot’; an inclusive, space (on a wall!) to place ideas for the Opportunity Bank that could be revisited and validated following research insights.
An understanding of WFC’s structure meant we could create a service blueprint explaining how the concepts prototyped and tested would work in unity with WFC staff, including their service design and digital teams.
Immerse
Secondly, we carry out research, an indispensable part of our work. Without immersing ourselves into the lives of those we’re trying to build for, anticipating pain-points, needs and motivations is impossible.
As ‘rational’ as we see ourselves, we live our lives through a single, biased lens; e.g as a 24 year old black male — It would be extremely ignorant of me to assume I could speak for women in the workplace or refute their experiences as people are experts of their own lived experience.
As common sense as this approach may be, the opposite commonly happens, with products and services being built without an in-depth understanding of how they may negatively affect people’s lives — racial bias with sentencing software & gender inequality with cars are two relevant examples.
We take time out to review secondary/desk research on our upcoming participants, creating a range of proto-personas to segment and identify who exactly research will be carried out with.
On a recent project with doteveryone, where we are currently co-designing financial safety nets and access to skills training for low paid, low agency gig workers, we defined the four terms in bold, establishing demographic parameters & research screeners based on race, gender, those with dependants, the platform used to make money (deliveroo, uber, airtasker), how hard it would be to leave gig work and financial earnings in relation to the London living wage.
The possibilities are wide open when it comes to connecting with communities and individuals. When we worked with the BBC in May 2018 to ‘create news articles of the future’, we conducted interviews with young/middle aged women and Gen Z individuals on their relationship, behaviours, goals and frustrations around the news.
On the ongoing doteveryone project, we have carried out interviews with at least a dozen gig economy workers. On the WFC project, we carried out just short of 30 ethnographic studies & interviews within a week, and with Projects By If we carried out two focus group sessions.
My co-founder Akil Benjamin created a unique framework for Connecting with Communities during research here (it’s an amazing article!).
Unify
At the Unify stage, we take the lessons from the immersive sessions and marry them with the project and organisational goals to produce our research insights. They act as an important guide, or sensibility for producing concepts and future project decision making. Traditionally, this is known as research synthesis.
Practically, this involves listening back to research tapes, jotting down relevant statements and categorising them into focus areas of the project. Afterwards, we analyse patterns and similarities in the statements and our initial desk research to compile our research insights.
Concept
Funnnnnnn! After the compiling of the insights at the Unification stage, we carry out ideation workshops with our clients to create concepts that can be prototyped and tested. Firstly, learnings and insights are presented to stimulate idea generation and design principles based on the research are stated to filter ideas.
Activities such as speed ideation dating (coming up with loads of ideas and building on them), concept development/storyboarding, taking ideas through a shopping cart to shortlist them and voting are carried out, normally within 1–2 intense days!
Ideation is typically carried out with research participants to ensure they have an opportunity to contribute to the services that’ll serve them. At the end of this, we typically have 2–4 ideas that survive the fire to be prototyped further.
Making
Making is done in two stages, low fidelity prototyping and high fidelity prototyping.
Low fidelity prototyping usually manifests itself in service posters, sketches, and mockups — essentially designs that can be presented to get feedback on early concepts before further development, and identify weak points in the service that might not have been addressed. Akil Benjamin puts it as a ‘good way to test the value proposition before all the glitz, glamour and shiny screens’.
Aside from being creative, we also create service propositions, addressing it’s context/purpose, the problem being addressed, associated risks & a strategic roadmap for future development, giving stakeholders insight on long term viability and on how concepts fit in with organisational goals.
On the ongoing doteveryone project, the long term goal of the project was to collaboration with external stakeholders such as gig platforms, banks, training providers & the government, so there was a shared understanding as to how important the concepts were.
Our goal is to give our clients the tools necessary to take a concept to a live service, aside collaborating initially to frame, research and take an idea to a real concept.
We get feedback after Low Fidelity prototyping & after High Fidelity prototyping through concept testing sessions with individuals that fit our target audience or were participants but were not part of concepting/ideation. Objectivity is key, so we don’t want participants commenting on ideas they’ve contributed to.
Our concept testing sessions are carried out either as focus groups, or one-to-one sessions if the focus is on getting raw, unfiltered feedback. Our job isn’t to get emotional if someone tells us that concepts are s***, but to make progressive improvements that can translate into a real product or service.
Following the feedback we get from low fidelity concept testing, we pick the best voted (and sometimes second best voted concept) to be developed and tested further into High Fidelity prototypes which are designed to feel as real as possible.’
Here are examples of some of the products and services we’ve further developed that we’re allowed to show (videos at the end):
BBC R&D Prototypes / Moodjar (Projects by If)
If you’d like to hear more about us and what we do, feel free to buzz me at richard@comuzi.xyz. We’re based in Zone 1, and are happy to jump on the tube for a coffee!
