Do Experiments!
Prototyping the experience before the interface
A couple of years ago I was working with a couple of business designers from IDEO. They showed me a prototype they had done for another client. It was an app for kids, but rather than focusing on the interface design of the app, they were experimenting with the experience of engaging with the app. Huh? Watch the 40 second clip below and be sure to see all of it.
I love this approach! Even though most of us aren't developing apps with dancing monsters, we should definately try to embrace the creativity and the way of experimenting into our corporate world. It's cheap, fast and fun. Alledgely the video above was made an hour before a conference call with the client.
Experiments come in many shapes
Recently I have been working with a financial company, helping them develop a digital product targeted a new market. They had already done an initial test of the value proposition by using pretotypes. My focus has been to prototype the future product and we have been following a process inspired by Goggle Ventures' Design Sprints.
We've now run a few sprints. In each sprint we have broken down the difficult parts of the product. We have done numerous sketches, wireframes and flows. We have been talking to (potential) customers trying to make our hypotheses prove right or wrong. Internally, we have been interviewing subject matter experts, and presented our weekly progress to a group of stakeholders.
The knowns and unknows
As with any project we've been facing a couple of tough questions such as "will someone even want this?", "how many ___ items do they find relevant?", "do they understand the relationship between price and risk? ... and what IS the desired pricing?" etc. Each sprint we've tried to map our known knowns and known unknowns and find ways to experiment: Ways to gain the insights and potential "unknown unknowns".
We have been able to move forward at a great pace due to the prototyping process and cleverly designed user studies, where potential customers have been engaging with a survey-acting-as-a-product. Although, it's far from a guy pretending to be a dancing monster, it has yielded valuable insights in a matter of days.
Get going!
Experimenting can take innovation to a whole new level and start entirely new businesses. What kind of experiments will you be launching this week?
