What is Prototype Thinking?
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Overview
Prototype Thinking is a methodology for rapid learning and iteration. You can use it to generate new ideas, solve business challenges, and validate solutions in a fraction of the time. The methodology focuses on testing and iteration — two aspects of design that are often overlooked and neglected. People love using Prototype Thinking because it’s fast, inexpensive, and fun. Anyone can use it and from anywhere in the world. From schools and social enterprises to developing world markets and corporate innovation labs, Prototype Thinking has become a popular method for user-friendly design. In this free guide, you’ll get exposed to the Prototype Thinking mindset, principles, and tools which you can apply to your own work.
What is Prototype Thinking?
Prototype Thinking is a user-friendly design process that makes prototyping, testing, and iteration easy and fun. You can use it when you’re not sure where to start, which direction to go in, or when you feel stuck. The process takes the best practices from Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Google Sprints and combines them with behavioral psychology, simulation-based qualitative research, and business design.
Whenever you sit down to work on a new project or business solution, the first question should always be ‘what are our top unknowns’. This encourages us to focus on solving the top unknown that will give us the biggest leverage. When we’re playing a video game, there are certain objects that can unlock more power than others. Ranking our unknowns works in the same way. When we start with a list of what we don’t know, we can plan experiments to find the answers. We start with the top unknown and then systematically move down our list solving each unknown, one by one.
Working in this way helps us move quickly. It enables us to employ our resources in the most efficient way, unlocking time, manpower, and resources as we go along. Using Prototype Thinking, you can de-risk books, events, marketing collateral, workflows, packaged goods, software, and even important conversations. The possibilities and applications are endless. Once, it was even applied to someone’s dating life!
Prototype Thinking can help your team or organization test more options in a shorter amount of time. It can help you make hundreds of changes and dozens of pivots that will reduce the risk associated with new ideas, products, and services -- ultimately saving you time and money.
Phases of Prototype Thinking
We teach the 5 phases of Prototype Thinking as a cyclic process. The goal is to go through a full cycle starting at concretize, grounding the problem in the real world, and to end on ideate, redesigning off the data. With practice, you’ll incrementally gain speed and be able to complete a full cycle in a day or less. A prototyping sprint typically takes 2-3 cycles.
Concretize: situate the idea in time and space Prototype: build a fast and concrete example
User test: get authentic, real-time responses from real users
Understand: synthesize observations and strategize next steps
Ideate: generate new ideas based on previous insights
When done correctly, Prototype Thinking will help you better understand the needs, mindsets, and realities’ of the people you’re serving, and innovative new solutions that are delightful, groundbreaking, and deeply impactful.
How do I apply Prototype Thinking?
You can use Prototype Thinking in virtually any area: new products or services, marketing campaigns, improving engagement and retention, roadmaps, portfolio strategies, and more. We’ve even used it to prototype our own careers.
Truly, this unique methodology can help you prototype, iterate, test and validate solutions instantaneously to get you the right answer the first time.