Tips for Prototype Thinking
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Tackle the top risk first
When you don’t know where to start, begin by writing down all of your top unknowns around your project or idea. Then, rank them in order of risk: which ones are most important to work out, that you are least confident about?
Once you have the list, design a quick experiment to give you confidence about Risk #1, and ignore everything below it. Once you solve your biggest problem, all the other interrelated ones will completely change.
Say “I don’t know; Let’s test it”
Our favorite saying is that if you can’t solve a problem in 10 minutes of discussion or debate, you’re not going to solve it in another 10 hours. One of the most powerful capabilities in the world is the ability to notice when you (or your team) doesn’t actually know the answer to something.
It’s okay not to know. The entire point of creating something new is to go into uncharted territory. Just stand up and say, “Hey, it looks like we don’t have the answer.” Then, design an experiment to go find the answer in a short amount of time. Most experiments can be put together and run in just a few hours.
Take a mediocre guess
Confident about where you’re going? Great, run with it.
Very often, however, we’re genuinely uncertain. That’s completely normal, however it is important not to let uncertainty paralyze us. In these cases, just take a mediocre guess at what the solution might be so you can keep moving forward with creating a tangible prototype.
The key here is to put in an amount of effort commensurate to your level of confidence. If you’re only 20% confident about your idea, don’t spend more than an hour on the prototype. Changes are high that 80% of it will change immediately anyway. If you’re 50% confident, it may be worth spending a day or so putting something together. If you’re 90% confident, time to invest a few weeks into building a working MVP or pilot.
Keep in mind that killer ideas don’t really come out of ideation sessions: they come out of experience and data.
If you’re prototyping and iterating a lot, you don’t need to start with a single great idea because you’ll be revising the idea constantly through user contact. The deeper your understanding of the situation, the more of the user’s life, beliefs, experiences, and internality around the challenge space you're exposed to, the more likely you will eventually come up with the right idea.
Live in the reality of the user
The vast majority of human behavior is subconscious. No user will ever give your product or service or solution their undivided attention.
Instead, it’s on you to build the solution out of the existing building blocks of their life and worldview. How do they structure their time? What language do they use? When, where, and how would they change their behavior to access your solution? What does it take to make that happen?
Get incredibly concrete & specific
All ideas are good ideas. However, an abstract statement will give you an hypothetical response with what the user thinks they think. But a concrete and specific design will give you a genuine response of what they actually unconsciously think.
This does not mean that it has to be a perfectly designed mock-up with every piece in place; it just needs to be free of generalizations that require the user's imagination to fill in.
Having a concrete and specific example provokes an authentic reaction. The more concrete it is, the more reliable the data you will get back. If you have a section that the user needs to imagine, then the user will need to fill in the blanks with their imagination and give you feedback that includes their imagination.
Instead, give your user incredibly concrete and specific examples so that they can give you their most authentic reaction.
Separate conjectures from actuals
When we start a project, we have a lot of conjectures. A conjecture is an educated guess. Conjectures are what we believe to be true and what we expect will happen.
Actuals, on the other hand, are what we learn from directly observing human behavior.
Our job is to turn conjectures into actuals through experimentation. Remember the saying: conjectures become experiments, actuals become decisions.
Look for the magic moments
A magic moment is when something about your product clicks and creates a visible, physical reaction in your user.
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It is the moment when it becomes clear that your offering has created a visceral, transformative difference for the user’s life.
We believe the heart of the product is the magic moment; the rest of the design serves as the path to get there.
Experiment in volume to maximize chances of success
We can’t control where we find the magic moments. What we can control is how many different experiments we try to get closer to the magic moment.
If you are left with open questions after thinking about it for half an hour, go ahead and build out a prototype of all the options and test them. Through this process it will become very clear what the landscape of solutions is and it will give you a clearer picture of which direction the answers lie.
Keep the 10% that works
Nothing we do is an absolute failure. There will always be 10% that works. Take it and keep adjusting.
You might not be able to control the outcome on a project, but you can control what you do with the information you learn.
Nail it before you scale it
Everyone wants to scale and grow. Sometimes we find that before our clients have built a working model, they’re already trying to reach a million users.
Knowing how to make something work and how to make it work for a lot of people are two different things. To make it scalable, we need to understand what the heart of the thing is.
Don’t put the cart before the horse. Make sure you’ve nailed the experience for 1 person before you scale it to the 2nd, 10th, and 100th.
Don’t wait for a complete testing plan or project scope
before you get started
Just as your design evolves in response to information that comes back, so should your design and testing process itself. If you find yourself spinning on building a testing roadmap, then just dive in without one. Quite often, the response to your first 3-4 tests will completely change how you think of the rest of the design process anyway.
There are many, many user testing tips and techniques: but no user testing technique is more powerful than literally just doing it.