Prototyping and storyboarding.pptx

Editor's Notes

• #4: Imagine this situation: It’s an exciting new project, something your team had spent months brainstormingand planning, then building and crafting to perfection. You did all you could to ensure it was just right, with all the necessary features. You tried to ensure that you gave design more focus and that your message was crafted well. The website attracted attention and brought in many interested visitors looking for the products you'd collected on the site, but somehow the product and service providers just weren't interested in testing it out. They seemed comfortable just to keep doing business as usual, uninterested in the thousands of hits your website was getting from potential customers. It made no sense to you, but there you were months later, having sweated and spent valuable time, money, and resources and even attracting visitors, but no customers. What went wrong? It's a story repeated time and time again—ideas being executed by people with an obsession for making a dent in the market, making big changes in society or just completely re-inventing the wheel, only to realise right at the end of their journey that they've been wasting their time or focussing on the wrong thing. This is where prototyping comes in by providing a set of tools and approaches for properly testing and exploring ideas before too many resources get used. Many of us may recall the art of prototyping from our early childhood where we created mock-ups of real-world objects with the simplest of materials such as paper, card, and modelling clay or just about anything else we could get our hands on. There is not much difference between these types of prototypes and the early rough prototypes we may develop at the earlier phases of testing out ideas.
• #6: Any finished product is just that—at the finishing line of a journey, a design journey involving a prototype or two (or more) with working titles such as ‘Mark I’, ‘Mark II’, ‘Mark III’, and so on. A prototype is a simple experimental model of a proposed solution used to test or validate ideas, design assumptions and other aspects of its conceptualisation quickly and cheaply, so that the designer/s involved can make appropriate refinements or possible changes in direction. Prototypes can take many forms, and just about the only thing in common the various forms have is that they are all tangible forms of your ideas. They don’t have to be primitive versions of an end product, either—far from it. Simple sketches or storyboards used to illustrate a proposed experiential solution, rough paper prototypes of digital interfaces, and even role-playing to act out a service offering an idea are examples of prototypes. In fact, prototypes do not need to be full products: you can prototype a part of a solution (like a proposed grip handle of a wheelchair) to test that specific part of your solution. Prototypes can be quick and rough — useful for early-stage testing and learning — and can also be fully formed and detailed — usually for testing or pilot trials near the end of the project. Prototyping is about bringing conceptual or theoretical ideas to life and exploring their real-world impact before finally executing them. All too often, design teams arrive at ideas without enough research or validation and expedite them to final execution before there is any certainty about their viability or possible effect on the target group.
• #7: Early Research isn't Everything Research conducted during the early stages of your Design Thinking project does not tell you everything you need to know in order to create the optimal solution. Regardless of whether you have researched thoroughly and gathered a large body of information, or whether your ideation sessions have resulted in what many perceive as a world-changing solution, testing is still crucial for success. Design teams can easily become fixated on the research artefacts they have gathered during the earlier phases of exploration, creating a bias towards their ideas. By prototyping and then testing those prototypes, you can reveal assumptions and biases you have towards your ideas, and uncover insights about your users that you can use to improve your solutions or create new ones. You can use prototyping as a form of research even before other phases in Design Thinking, allowing you to explore problem areas in interfaces, products or services, and spot areas for improvement or innovation
• #11: . For example, the model might be incomplete and utilise just a few of the features that will be available in the final design, or it might be constructed using materials not intended for the finished article, such as wood, paper, or metal for a plastic product. Low-fidelity prototypes can either be models that are cheaply and easily made, or simply recounts or visualisations of them. Examples of low-fidelity prototypes: Storyboarding. Sketching (although Bill Buxton, a pioneer of human-computer interaction, argues sketching is not an example of prototyping). Card sorting. 'Wizard of Oz'. Pros of Low-Fidelity Prototyping Quick and inexpensive. Possible to make instant changes and test new iterations. Disposable/throw-away. Enables the designer to gain an overall view of the product using minimal time and effort, as opposed to focusing on the finer details over the course of slow, incremental changes. Available to all; regardless of ability and experience, we are able to produce rudimentary versions of products in order to test users or canvas the opinions of stakeholders. Encourages and fosters design thinking. Cons of Low-Fidelity Prototyping An inherent lack of realism. Due to the basic and sometimes sketchy nature of low-fi prototypes, the applicability of results generated by tests involving simple early versions of a product may lack validity. Depending on your product, the production of low-fi prototypes may not be appropriate for your intended users. For instance, if you are developing a product bound by a number of contextual constraints and/or dispositional constraints (i.e. physical characteristics of your user base, such as users with disabilities) then basic versions that do not reflect the nature, appearance or feel of the finished product may be of scant use; revealing very little of the eventual user experience. Such prototypes often remove control from the user, as they generally have to interact in basic ways or simply inform an evaluator, demonstrate or write a blow-by-blow account of how they would use the finished product.
• #12: Likewise, an early version of a software system developed using a design program such as Sketch or Adobe Illustrator is high-fi in comparison to a paper prototype. Pros of High-Fidelity Prototyping Engaging: the stakeholders can instantly see their vision realised and will be able to judge how well it meets their expectations, wants and needs. User testing involving high-fi prototypes will allow the evaluators to gather information with a high level of validity and applicability. The closer the prototype is to the finished product, the more confidence the design team will have in how people will respond to, interact with and perceive the design. Cons of High-Fidelity Prototyping They generally take much longer to produce than low-fi prototypes. When testing prototypes, test users are more inclined to focus and comment on superficial characteristics, as opposed to the content (Rogers, Preece, and Sharp, 2011). After devoting hours and hours of time producing an accurate model of how a product will appear and behave, designers are often loathed to make changes. Software prototypes may give test users a false impression of how good the finished article may be. Making changes to prototypes can take a long time, thus delaying the entire project in the process. However, low-fi prototypes can usually be changed within hours, if not minutes, for example when sketching or paper prototyping methods are utilised. Due to the pros and cons of low-fi and high-fi prototyping, it should be no surprise that low-fi prototyping is the usual option during the early stages of a Design Thinking project, while high-fi prototyping is used during the later stages, when the test questions are more refined.
• #13: Guidelines for Prototyping It is important to remember that prototypes are supposed to be quick and easy tests of design solutions. Here are a few guidelines that will help you in the Prototyping stage: Just start buildingDesign Thinking has a bias towards action: that means if you have any uncertainties about what you are trying to achieve, your best bet is to just make something. Creating a prototype will help you to think about your idea in a concrete manner, and potentially allow you to gain insights into ways you can improve your idea. Don’t spend too much timePrototyping is all about speed; the longer you spend building your prototype, the more emotionally attached you can get with your idea, thus hampering your ability to objectively judge its merits. Remember what you’re testing forAll prototypes should have a central testing issue. Do not lose sight of that issue, but at the same time, do not get so bound to it so as to lose sight of other lessons you could learn from. Build with the user in mindTest the prototype against your expected user behaviours and user needs. Then, learn from the gaps in expectations and realities, and improve your ideas.
• #14: Sketching is one of the earliest forms of prototyping you can use. It requires very little effort and does not necessarily rely on artistic levels of drawing skill to prove useful, and therein lies its value. Use sketches to illustrate your ideas and launch them into the real world — even the simplest and crudest of sketches can easily achieve that. Sketch simple illustrations of your concepts so that they don’t exist only in your mind, hence allowing you to share these with your team-mates for further discussion and ideation. Even the messiest of scrawls (not that what we see above is a messy scrawl) can serve as nurturing “soil” to make the seed of an idea sprout into a first-class end product. You can also sketch diagrams and mind maps in order to illustrate a system, process, or the structure of your ideas. You can sketch the various touch points that affect a user’s journey, and then identify how they relate to one another. Alternatively, you can visualise and analyse how your ideas can relate to one another and complement (or sometimes compete with) one another. Diagramming is a useful way to understand complex situations or use cases, where many factors and players affect one another. Journey maps, behaviour maps, system flow diagrams, and a range of other mapping methods are at your service to help you scope out complex situations. Sketching is a valuable method of prototyping because you can do it practically everywhere, with a paper and pen, or even on your smartphone or tablet.
• #15: Lego’s genius transcends child’s play — we have much to tap from Lego as regards prototyping. Lego is a staple of any kid's toy box. Its versatility and ability to spark imagination is what drives the company's success. As a designer, you can take advantage of Lego’s ubiquity and versatility to create quick and simple prototypes of your ideas. The best part of using Lego to build your prototypes is that they become easy to dismantle and tweak; simply detach a part of your Lego prototype, swap it with an alternative design, and play with it to see if it works. As Tim Brown, CEO of international design firm IDEO, recounts in his book Change by Design, Lego prototyping has been widely used in IDEO’s design thinking process, including once where it was used to create a prototype for a complex insulin injection device. In fact, Lego has taken its toy’s ability to stimulate creativity and ideation seriously. In collaboration with Johan Roos and Bart Victor, professors at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, it launched Lego Serious Play, a methodology that aims to foster creative thinking and problem solving in businesses. However, for the purposes of prototyping, any Lego should suffice. You can use Lego bricks to create rough prototypes of products... or use Lego characters to simulate a user’s journey. This allows your team to dive straight into setting up your scenarios and telling stories.
• #17: When the end result is a physical product, you can use a wide range of materials to build mock-ups for testing. You can use rough materials, such as paper, cardboard, clay, or foam, and you can also repurpose existing objects you find around you in order to build physical models. The purpose of a physical model is to bring an intangible idea, or two-dimensional sketch, into a physical, three-dimensional plane. This allows for much better testing with users, and it can spark discussions about the form factor of the solution.
• #18: Wizard of Oz prototypes are prototypes with faked functions — for instance, interactivity that comes from a human rather than an algorithm or software code, with users believing the latter is the case — that you can use to test with your users. Like the wizard of Oz in the story (who generates an ominous, magical and deceptive appearance from behind a curtain), you are mimicking some aspects of your product for the sake of prototyping it, allowing you to save time and resources. The most common example of Wizard of Oz prototypes is a prototype of a digital system, where the user is “tricked” into thinking the system responses are computer-driven, when they are actually human-controlled — such as a piece of virtual assistant software in which a human, working on another computer, types the responses. Note—ethically, we as designers are well within the boundaries when doing this; it does not involve manipulating users for immoral gain.
• #19: Storyboards Telling stories is an excellent way of guiding people through a user experience. Storyboarding, a technique derived from the film industry, is something you can use for early prototyping to allow yourself to visualise the user’s journey or how users would experience a problem or product. When you draw storyboards, try to imagine the complete user experience, and then capture it in a series of images or sketches. In Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design, Whitney Quesenbery, co-director of Center for Civic Design, and English writer Kevin Brooks explain the benefits of using stories in design projects. According to them, stories not only enable us to collate information on users, tasks, and goals but also spark new ideas by encouraging discussions and collaboration between ourselves and other designers. By drawing out a user’s experience, we also better understand their world and are thus able to think in their shoes. Storyboarding, as a prototyping method, ensures that we know our users well enough (it would be hard to sketch a storyboard otherwise) and allows us to keep in mind the context of the solution we are designing. It is useful for developing an empathic understanding of users — and for generating high-level ideation and discussions. Storyboards, however, are not very useful for fine-tuning the details of products, because the drawings tend to be more macroscopic in nature. You don’t need to be a great artist to create a great Storyboard. By visually plotting out elements of your product or service, you can learn a lot about your idea. Not only will this method help you refine what your idea is, it can also reveal who will use it, where, and how. Like all prototypes, the idea here is to make something really rough as a way to help you think the idea through. It’s amazing what putting pen to paper can reveal. STEPS With a partner, determine what it is you want to prototype. You don’t have to Storyboard the entire offering. Use it to test even one component of your idea, like an interaction, or how a customer finds your product. Spend no more than 30-45 minutes drawing how your ideas work. Use a series of comic book-style frames for your drawing. This will help you spotlight key moments and build a short narrative. Don’t get hung up on your drawing abilities. It’s more important that it helps you fully think through your concept than create something that looks beautiful. Once you’re done, act out the Storyboard to your team for feedback.