Rules for rapid prototypers

Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation

Prototyping and experimentation

Rules for rapid prototypers: building your skills

The heart of prototyping is making your ideas seem real in order to learn about how people interact with them. There are many different ways of doing this and as you get more experienced you will be able to come up with new methods yourself. For now, here are a few techniques to get you started. These techniques range from cheap and quick tests that lend themselves to exploratory prototyping, to more intensive methods suitable for more detailed, developmental prototyping.

You will recognise the websites below from the last module, where we referenced them as great sources for 'ideation' techniques. They are all equally strong on prototyping so again, you may want to have a quick look at one or two as you build your prototyping approach:

The Service Design Tools website (a free crowd-sourced resource, curated by Roberta Tassi and colleagues from The Service Innovation Academy at Milan Polytechnic
The 'This is Service Design Doing Method Library', another fabulous free resource offered by Jakob Schneider & Marc Stickdorn, at 'This is Service Design Thinking'
The Design Kit – more methods and tips, offered by ideo.org, the not-for-profit global design studio.

Importantly, the prototyping phase requires collaboration. Other stages of the innovation cycle can be done on your own but you can't really test your own ideas on yourself!

Prototyping approaches: Exploratory vs developmental prototyping

When we first start to design our prototyping approach, we need to consider what we want our prototypes to achieve - are we aiming to 'stay open', trying to gain more understanding of the context? Or are we pretty sure about the ideas we want to test and looking to trial them in a more practical way? Our choices here will guide us towards more exploratory approaches or more developmental approaches.

You can read more about each of these approaches below:

Exploratory prototyping

Exploratory prototyping is often quite rapid and direct. The aim is to inspire new ideas, and highlight risks and opportunities quickly. Exploratory prototyping is generally quite cheap involving drawings on paper or using models, rather than anything more resource intensive. With exploratory prototyping we are usually testing what people will go for, what excites them, what value they are looking for, etc.

Developmental prototyping

Developmental prototyping usually comes after exploratory prototyping and helps us to refine our idea. At this stage, we have a good overall sense of our idea and how it is going to work. Now we want to work out the details. We might be testing how it can be implemented, what the sequence of activities should be, exactly how it should be communicated and so on.

Exploring or developing?

A cross graph shows an x axis with 'Generate' on the left and 'Validate' on the right. On the y axis, the top is labelled 'Detailed' and the bottom is labelled 'Rough'. In the top left quadrant is 'Paper prototyping' and in the bottom left quadrant is 'Desktop prototyping' above 'Role-playing'. At the top across the y axis is 'Service touchpoints' and in the top right quadrant it 'Experience prototyping' and Staging with actors and audiences. The bottom right quadrant contains the word 'Storyboarding'.

Here we focus on five prototyping processes that are used across public sector organisations to test new ideas and develop new services. The approaches are listed in order of complexity – try early ones on the list before you move on to the larger, more complicated approaches.

Storyboarding (bringing diverse voices together)
Desktop prototyping (using our visual imagination)
Role play (understanding what it is like to live the experience)
Experience prototyping (thinking from a different perspective)
System prototyping (getting other people to generate ideas for you!)

Techniques for prototyping

Storyboarding

As previously mentioned in the 'Ideation and creativity' module, storyboarding is essentially making a cartoon about how your idea will work. With this technique, you break your idea down into a series of ‘frames’ where things happen for an individual user of the service. Storyboarding is a very simple way of communicating a lot of complex information about your idea.

Storyboards are engaging for a wide range of stakeholders and therefore become a great basis to investigate an idea further. The most useful storyboards will look a bit ‘unfinished’. This is because if an idea is finished it can be hard for others to get involved and offer their own thoughts and solutions. Intentionally creating gaps in your storyboard where there are problems you don’t know how to solve yet will help to invite people in to helping you find a solution.

Storyboarding is great for exploring risks within an idea or ensuring that a number of desired interactions link up to form the best pathway for the user.

Desktop prototyping

Desktop prototyping involves using models to run through how key elements of your service would work. This technique is especially useful for any idea that relies on multiple people or physical spaces, since it gives a very easy way to test out some of these interactions.

Desktop prototyping enables you to create an overview of the processes or physical spaces you wish to explore and helps to bring to light new opportunities and areas that require more detailed investigation.

Materials that are easy to assemble and use, such as Lego or cardboard, are essential here. The basic principle is to create a version of the idea you want to explore in miniature, and then run walkthroughs with different characters to explore how your idea would work in different scenarios.

This method will help you to create a list of actions for further development and testing. Other prototyping methods, such as role-playing, can be used after desktop prototyping, to test out some of the more specific aspects of your idea or service.

Roleplay

Role-play is a great way to explore specific relationships or interactions that are key to your idea. It can be a challenging thing to do for some people and so you might want to enlist the help of an actor to support your team and build people’s confidence.

Role-play works best when some people are actively participating and others are observing, asking questions and raising challenges. To do role-play well, you need to plan it:

Identify the parameters of your test
Script some key interactions
Set a number of specific challenges to work on
Task observers with key requirements for the service that they should look out for
Use other methods, such as storyboarding and desktop prototyping to help you plan what to role-play.

Freeze-frame is a very useful method to use during roleplaying. Simply call out ‘freeze frame’ at key moments in a role-play and ask each person who is acting or observing to describe what they currently see, feel and think.

Experience prototyping

Experience prototyping involves creating something that is as close as possible to a real version of the service you are designing and then allowing people to go through the experience of your service. You could think of it as a pilot for between one and ten people, which lasts from one hour to a few weeks only.

Experience prototyping is the most comprehensive form of prototyping and often requires more time and effort than other forms of prototyping. However, it can be one of the most valuable techniques, enabling you to gain rich insight into your idea.

To make a success of experience prototyping you will need to consider the following:

Where should this take place? Which elements of the environment will we need to create? Or can we use an existing environment?
What tools and physical objects that are key parts of the idea will we need to mock up?
Who should take part so that we learn exactly what we need to?
Who could be present that we could convince about our idea through the prototype?
How are we going to mitigate any risks involved in this prototype?
Have we exhausted other, easier forms of prototyping before we start this?

System prototyping

System prototyping allows you to explore the conditions and environment in which your service operates with people who have some influence over those conditions. We never have total control over a particular issue, so system prototyping can be a way of developing collaboration between organisations that can create the conditions for your service to have a real impact.

System prototyping can involve elements of other kinds of prototyping, for example role-play or desktop prototyping. However, instead of testing how users of a service interact, here you are testing how providers and commissioners work together. You might want to invite key players in a system together to test a range of scenarios that highlight the current conditions in the system or that model how the system could work differently.

Often concrete examples are the most productive strategy. Choosing a very specific challenge to work on can highlight many general issues and opportunities around communication, leadership and joint working, as well as generating practical solutions.

Prototyping with users

The key thing that sets prototyping apart from other kinds of tests is that it is crucially with users. So once you have planned what you need to test, and how you are going to make that element of your service come to life, the next thing to plan is how you are going to share this with potential users. One way of doing this is to run a prototyping workshop but you can also test out your ideas in a smaller way wherever and whenever you interact with your target users. Whichever approach you choose, you will need a good plan which lays out what you are trying to test and why. You can use our Prototyping plan template to help you do this.

Prototyping is a great way to build energy. You may instinctively think that prototyping is scary for people. But the experience is actually the opposite – people love to be invited inside the development process. Doing so demonstrates trust and respect, it also helps users and staff feel part of changes and new developments. Involvement in prototyping significantly builds energy, excitement and loyalty in both staff and users.

Make sure everyone knows it’s a prototype! It is really important that participants involved in a prototype know that they are involved in a test. With some of the quick, cheap methods this will be more obvious, but it is still worth emphasizing that you are not committed to carrying out any of the ideas in the prototype – instead you are using them to explore what would be the best thing to do.

With some of the more detailed methods, in particular experience prototyping, users may get benefit from the prototyped service, which means there is greater potential for confusion with an actual service.

It is very important therefore, that you are clear that the prototype is time limited, that it is being conducted to learn about what could be best, and that the prototype can change if we decide that we need to learn something else.

You know your users best, so you will know the best way to handle these situations. You may decide that some activities are not appropriate for more vulnerable people, but there will always be some way of involving them and including their voices in the development process.

In more depth: Getting good feedback

Getting good feedback on your prototypes can be harder than you think. This is because most people like to please each other. So the beginning prototyper tends to over-sell their idea because they want the participant to like it, and the participant will tend to give positive feedback because they want to please the prototyper. Here are a few suggestions to help you get past this:

Observe: Don’t just listen to what they say, watch what they do. When are people excited and engaged? When are they hesitant? What is their body language like? How do they interact with the physical elements of your prototype?
Seek honest and critical feedback: Show both the positive and negative sides of your idea. By showing that you don’t think it is perfect, you give the other person license to comment more freely.
Be agile: If people get stuck on one aspect of the idea, feel free to change it immediately so you learn something new.
Get people building on your idea: Let people be innovators with you. For example, if they ask you a clarifying question, you can reflect it back: how do they think it should work there? Ask them how the idea could be improved or made more accessible for them.
Get them focussed on their own experience: Many people are quick to tell you who else the idea would be good for and why they would like it, but the truth is, these are usually unhelpful assumptions. Unless the participant has a particularly empathetic understanding of another person or set of people, it’s much better to focus the question on what the idea would mean to them.

One last thing before you begin…

If you have put a lot of work into an idea it can be easy to get attached to it, even if it really isn’t working. In this case, be ready to modify or transform your idea if necessary. On the other hand, if you feel your idea isn’t working, it can also be easy to panic and latch on to any positive feedback.

As you run each of your prototyping exercises, you will need to carefully capture your learning and the feedback you've been getting. You can use this Prototype monitoring template to keep a record as you go.

Try to stay focused on the objectives you set yourself at the beginning of the innovation cycle and the reasons you selected your idea for development. Think about how you can design around the challenges that are presented. When you do need to change your idea substantially, make sure you do so based on reasoning that you can trace back through your project.

Pause for reflection

Which of the prototyping methods listed above feel most appealing to you? [Hint: consider whether you are 'exploring' or 'developing' your ideas and choose methods that are suited those phases]

Which combination of methods is most suitable for ideas you have chosen to experiment with? Which fit best with your context?

Which methods do you want to use to engage with your users? Your colleagues? Other partners? [You can also use some of the methods to bring all of those groups together]. What will you need to consider in each case – messaging, practicalities, ethics etc.?

Which one could you get going on right now? Who else do you want to involve in your Experiment phase? [You can use the template here to plan out your Prototyping process].

Continue to: Gathering your learning

Leading for Libraries Sets

Introduction

Introducing the Leading Libraries series. It covers the findings from the C21st Public Servant research, the origins of the four 'Leading for' capabilities and explains how to use the materials.

INTRODUCTION

Leading for Resilience

This set introduces you to resilience and why it is important for leaders. It covers emotional resilience; mental resilience; relationship resilience and social resilience.

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Leading for Dialogue

It covers the key concepts of dialogue and why it is important for leaders, listening and inquiry skills, an introduction to 'conversational moves' and how to create a space for dialogue.

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Leading for Inclusion

Emphasising the need for inclusive practice in our services and communities. It covers the foundations of inclusion, barriers to inclusion, power and privilege and allyship skills.

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Leading for Innovation

Building creativity and design skills for leaders. It covers the innovation cycle, diagnosis and perspective shifting skills, creative idea generation and safe-to-fail experimentation.

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