Day 14: The Pinocchio
Smoke testing, wireframing, MVP. There are lots of ways (and words!) for prototyping and testing ideas. Sometimes it can be as simple as having a sketch of your idea to show your target audience and get some quick feedback.
When I worked in the Innovation team at Action for Children, one of the fundraising ideas we were exploring was a gardening subscription — families donate a regular gift and in exchange receive a seeds and a digital gardening pack each season. One of the ways we prototyped the idea was by creating some Facebook adverts that invited families to register their interest to receive the gardening activities. The data and insight I gathered in the experiment helped me to gauge interest in the idea before building the product (or hunting down thousands of seeds from garden centres, that came later!)
What is a prototype
A prototype is a way to test your ideas with users, it’s a tool for bringing ideas to life. It helps you avoid wasting time, money and energy on building big things that don’t work. It also helps you avoid getting attached to ideas — something that’s more likely to happen when you’ve invested lots of time and energy in one idea.
It is important to have a a clear plan for what you want to learn from testing your prototype, and how you will measure that. What is your hypothesis, the thing that you are trying to find out is true or not? What data are you collecting and how? How will you know your experiment has failed?
What is The Pinocchio prototype?
Today I was thinking about how might we support community businesses to prototype community technology. I was reading about a technique called The Pinocchio in The Experiment Types for EdTech.
The Pinocchio is when you:
Build a non-functional, ‘lifeless’ version of your product to see how people respond.
Case Study of The Pinocchio
In 2018, Onyx Connect put ‘fake GPS’ units on their pay-as-you-go bicycles in Zambia to test if this deterred bike theft. The GPS units looked convincing but were switched off and not actually collecting location data (which is expensive and requires regulatory approval)
The Experiment Types for EdTech
What are the opportunities
- Low cost
- Low-fi (you don’t need the technical expertise to build the “real” deal version of your product or idea)
- Helps you understand user behaviour
- Pace — it can be quick, but even Pinocchios can take time to build
What are the risks
- Consider the unintended consequences that your experiment might have on the community or user groups you are testing with, particularly if prototyping a digital service that responds to the needs of vulnerable groups. What are the consequences you want to mitigate?
- If running an observation experiment to see how users behaviour and they do not know your product is a “lifeless” version of the digital solution you are creating, there may be gaps in your data and understanding of why they behave in a certain way.
- If running an experiment where users know that your product is a “lifeless version” of the digital solution you are creating, they may need some support to get into the creative zone and imagine that it has certain features or functionality it lacks.
Extra resources:
- CAST’s Digital Skill Framework has lots of support and useful resources to get started on prototyping your ideas.
- Read about The Pinocchio and other experiment types in this resource Experiment Types for EdTech. Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0
- More detail about how we prototyped a gardening subscription pack, the Growing Challenge with the Very Hungry Caterpillar™ at Action for Children.
Hello! I am running a 30 day experiment in open working to help me understand the benefits and challenges, so I can get better at supporting social impact organisations to work in the open. I would love to hear your comments, ideas and feedback! Thank you, Ellen
