Our 5 weeks journey of Human-Centered Design: Prototyping
Learning prototyping from IDEO’s design method
We have all sorts of ideas, but we are scared to try an idea often because the risk is always in our minds. How can we make our idea come to life? Building a simple prototype helps to support the idea and test at the earliest possible stage, mitigating risk. We made a simple prototype for each workshop and presented it. I was amazed at how helpful this is. We were able to get valuable feedback even if the prototype isn’t perfect. Iterating between prototyping, testing, and refining is the key to making a good product in an efficient way. During process creation, you need to have empathy with end-users because our product is all for people.
About the Course
Our group took Human-Centered Design 201: Prototyping course from Nov to Dec in 2019 over the 5 weeks. The course was free, developed +Acumen and IDEO.org, and hosted by the NovoEd platform. The requirement is to form a team, meet in person weekly and submit a summary of the project each week.
Week 1 is more of a warm-up and intro to the course. The main goal is brainstorming, prototyping, giving feedback, and iterating. Everyone in the class had to create prototypes. We created them by using anything to hand like pens, paper, play dough, scissors, and more. Making a tangible prototype was a fresh experience for us because we use software all the time like Sketch and Figma.
“How might we improve health in everyday places” is the project theme. There are 4 categories of the environment: At Home, At Work, At School, In Your Community. We brainstormed what kind of service and product that can help improve health for each category. After brainstorming, each team selected an idea related to the product and made a prototype.
Team 1 (2 people)
Project: Community Garden
Team 2 (2 people)
Project: Customizable Lunch Box
Team 3 (3 people — My team)
Project: Healthy Food for students
Challenge of Team 3
How we can provide healthy, inexpensive and fast food for school students.
Solution
Provide a vending machine that sells healthy food
Key Takeaway
The key takeaway for this assignment was to narrow down the project scope for better focus. Team 1 and Team 2’s projects are more practical and have clear goals. Team 3’s project had quite few potential problems during the process. How can we keep the food fresh and safe? How can we do the maintenance? Do we need to make a customized vending machine? Team 3 stumbled on potential problems that are quite wide ranging.
The main idea of the prototype is mitigating the risk before diving into the process. Presenting people with physical prototypes and the feedback session allowed us to find new problems and solutions. Team 3 knew after the feedback session, our scope was too big to begin.
Week 2 is to define the user by making personas and user journeys. We also did a roleplaying and feedback session. The first half of the class was to select a service-related project, define users by creating a persona and journey map, and role-playing in a group. The last half is getting feedback from other teams and guests. Each team presented what is their service and then role played a key moment. We needed to invite guests outside of the team to get a fresh perspective for our feedback session.
Team 1 (2 people)
Project: HairStyle Advising Service from Hair Stylist
Team 2 (3 people — My team)
Project: Healthy Habits for Employees
Challenge of Team 2
How to motivate employees for the regular workout
Solution
One solution is to provide flexible workout class schedules for the people who have different lifestyles. The other is to get points every time the employee joins a class. These points can be used to donate to one of a selection of good causes.
Key Takeaway
Making a persona and journey map, then role playing the key moments of the process helped understand the user better. The roleplay assisted the team to have empathy with the user and that led us to find a few missing steps.
Week 3 is preparation for the Week 4’s field test. This field test project was the first time conducted with the whole team. First, we chose an idea for the project. Second, we made a task list that we need to do. We categorized those tasks by the timeline: before, during and after the test. Then we allocated tasks to the team members.
More heads are better? Yes, but also more ideas come to the table. The hardest thing for this week was brainstorming. We had a lot of ideas, but it was hard to select one. We also kept in mind where we could test these ideas, at work, at a park, or at a school etc.
The Whole Team: (5 people)
Project: Break a Stretch — Prevent the pain that comes from the desk work by providing stretch class.
Key Takeaway
The idea of providing a stretch class during work may not be a novelty, but it is a good chance to give awareness of your body’s state, and reduce repetitive stress.
When we tried to select an idea, we got stuck. We were told to pick up an idea in 10 minutes but it took 1 hour and a half. Our breakthrough was from asking simple questions. What is our problem we can see around us? How can we solve it? Finding a problem was the key to the project.
Week 4’s focus is testing in a more realistic situation and getting feedback from the attendants. The testing should be productive as possible. Our project Break a Stretch was supposed to be performed at work. The closest place we found was a co-working place. We conducted a 10 minutes stretch class with co-working people.
Project: Break a Stretch — Prevent the pain that comes from the desk work by providing stretch class.
Timeline Before the Day
· Announce the event on co-working people’s slack
· Design poster
· Prepare Instruction of stretch
The Day
· Hang on a poster on the wall
· Announce to the co-work group about the event in person
· Instructor starts class
· Feedback session
Role
Anita: Instructor
Yigit: Post & Photos
Seiko: Event Planner & Rewards
Chi: Feedbacks from People
Joanne: Poster & Promoter
Feedback
- More inclined to use stretch classes in a group setting
- Targeted stretches might be more useful
- People were energized afterward and needed a cooldown
- Some felt obliged to join because they couldn’t have worked
- More accessible instructions poster
- Reminding people about deep breathing during stretch
- Noise, crowd and small space were negatives
Key Takeaway
Planning and preparation are key to conducting a test smoothly. Before starting the test, we checked all the steps with the team again to recap the flow of the test. We had more people join than expected, so we had to adjust the class and space needed for each person. It didn’t take long to adjust because we all knew what needed to be done. After the class, we saw people recognize their own soreness and relaxing more, so we knew our field test was on target. We could improve the feedback session by asking for volunteers before the test. Only one person volunteered to go to the feedback session, and we needed to find more people.
Prototyping is core to the Human-Centered Design. We created a simple prototype at an early stage and tested it with the end-user. We only had under one hour to create a simple prototype or supporting goods. I felt it wasn’t enough time, but I learned even simple prototypes allowed us to get valuable feedback. In the early stage of testing, we don’t have a perfect solution, but we can see if our product is going the right direction or not. Testing and improving, this iteration refines the product each time. We are making products to solve people’s problems and the focus should always be on the end-user.
Thank you for reading!
