Let's talk about prototyping. How to prototype, why prototyping is valuable. There's a bunch of reasons. Why is it valuable? Most importantly, it helps you communicate, just like any kind of visual thinking. Prototyping can help you get feedback. This is a really huge opportunity here. As Dennis Boyle from IDEO said, never attend a meeting without a prototype, cuz you want to get feedback. Why are you having this meeting? You give people a chance to tell you how what you've just created aligns with what they want. Save yourself time and money and effort by getting a prototype in your users' hands, in your clients' hands, in your customers' hands, so that they can tell you you're on the right track. Make a decision. A prototype can help you decide. You think maybe you want to have version a, but you're not quite sure if people would like version b more or version c if you did this extra thing. You just need to make a decision now cuz it's time to move on and choose one path. Mock up each of the three and put it in the user's hands and let them help you make the decision. A stress test. You just made the new product, and it's aluminum. And you're about to order 10,000 units of it. Why don't you try it out first with a prototype? Make sure the aluminum is thick enough. Do you need to add a couple of millimeters because it broke when you tested it? Find that out now, before you order 10,000 units. Gaining empathy. You create a prototype, put it in your user's hands, and watch them interact with it. You understand from their perspective what they expect to happen. Let them take it home and take notes on their experience, or see if you can videotape them using it in context. Understand what it's like for them. Did they put it under their arm cuz it was kind of heavy and bulky? They didn't put it in a bag. Learn these things, so that you can add more value for them. Build excitement. You know who loves prototypes? Investors. You want to build excitement? You want to get their resources? You want to get their support? Give them a prototype to fool around with. It's the same for all kinds of clients and users. Brainstorming. We're gonna talk a lot about brainstorming in a future lecture. But if you make a prototype when you're brainstorming, a quick one, whip something together, your teammates that you're collaborating with will be able to go further and farther with that idea because you've made it tangible. All right, I'm gonna give you a big list of types of prototypes, and then we'll go through each one individually. So the first one is storytelling. This is the least expensive, the simplest kind, but it's certainly real. Sketching, drawing something, yes, that's prototyping if you show it to somebody. Storyboarding, very common in the movie industry. Modeling and making a physical thing out of clay or wood. The Wizard of Oz prototyping style. That's used often with apps and websites and software. Video prototyping, using movie magic to simulate something. Skits and role-play, absolutely. And analogous prototyping, sometimes called works like, feels like. So the value of storytelling is that it works in a pinch. You really don't need any materials. If you want to get someone to understand what you're trying to convey, what's the big idea here, tell them a story about someone using it, or them using it. Start with the word imagine. Imagine you're sitting on an airplane and there's two empty seats next to you. Suddenly they're placing themselves there. Now obviously there can be clarity, there can be communication issues if you don't tell a very detailed story, or if they start imagining something completely different, which is why you use storytelling in a pinch maybe. There are more high-resolution opportunities, like sketching. These are a couple of clients of mine doing that same crash course exercise that you did in the first week, from the Stanford D school. Remember that page with the five drawings? Those are prototypes. You used to them to get feedback from your partner. Storyboarding. The concept here is to break down each step in the user's experience or the client's experience. Make almost a comic strip about it. On this example, the product is a mobile app called GMO Tracker. It lets a customer come into a grocery store and determine whether the product they're about to buy contains any GMOs, any genetically modified organisms. Some people don't like them. But the product won't really say on the box this contains GMOs. So now they're empowering their potential customer with a mobile app. Scan it and it'll tell you. So instead of doing all the work to create this product, all the developing work and the design work, they just do a storyboard of it and start showing that to people. Hey, what if this existed? How would you experience it? Would it be something that would add value to your life, and how? If it worked like this, is that what you're looking for? Modeling, yes. Somebody has an idea for a new wheelchair that works with hand crank pedals instead of just grabbing the sides of the wheels. And so they make this model. And they can easily transport this, bring it into somebody's office or home, somebody who currently uses a standard wheelchair, and say, if it worked this way, would that be interesting to you? Do you like or dislike this model? The user can play with it, they can hold it. They can say, hey, I'm a little concerned that if there's no board along the bottom to put my feet on, my feet will get tangled up in that bar there and I'll run myself over. And the product manager then, or the designer, can say, hang on one sec, get out a piece of cardboard, snip it up, glue it on, and show. Is this what you mean, a board like this? And the user says, yes, thank you, that's all I'm talking about. So instead of having to build an entire wheelchair, they make a small model. Use clay or Popsicle sticks or cardboard, plasticine. Take a look at this little video about Wizard of Oz prototyping. And this is a simulation of a blood testing kiosk. These people have mocked up using paper and cardboard. And a human being as the computer processor. We call that the Wizard of Oz style. >> Okay, you are about to take a blood extraction test. You'll be choosing from three tests, between pregnancy, STD, or blood analysis. Please vocalize any thoughts you have, positive or negative, while testing the product. You'll be handed a credit card as a form of payment. Let's begin. [INAUDIBLE] >> Here's another great method for prototyping, video simulation. So this is using movie magic to make it look like a product already exists. A little bit more advanced, this one is from Land Rover, and they're playing with this idea. Here is a transparent bonnet. That's British English for hood. The hood of the car now is transparent using my special technology. It'll look just like this. So watch the video and you'll see it looks like it already exists. But there on that front screen it says virtual prototype in testing. [MUSIC] Skits, we talked about this before. Acting a thing out or using a puppet show. This a great way to demonstrate a service or some kind of new experience that a user might have. Do it for them live, right there, or take a video of it and show them the video. A lot of crossover here between acting, role-playing and video prototyping. Analogous prototyping. So in this case you might use an existing product and just say, ours is like this, but in one way it's different. So interact with this and imagine that other thing is true. Tell me about your experience. Here is the first version of the Palm Pilot. So Palm Pilot was an early PDA, for folks who don't know. A precursor to the smartphone, PDA was a personal digital assistant. So this thing, about the size of a smartphone. It could do, I think, only three major tasks. You could use it for your contacts, it held 750 contacts' phone numbers, you could use it for your calendar, for keeping appointments, and you could take notes on it. So the Palm Pilot in 1986 was a huge leap forward in technology. It was battery powered, you just put it in your pocket. Think about the computer that you had in 1986, or think about the VCR you had in 1996. I mean, this thing existed then. That was huge. And it was a really amazing piece of technology for its user interface, for the user experience. People loved it for that. But why is there a block of wood there? That's what the person who was in charge of creating the Palm Pilot used as his first prototype. This block of wood, he carried it around with him. He would say, look, imagine that this thing can be your calendar, you can take notes on it and you can keep your contacts on it. It's this size. It weighs about this much. It feels like this in your hand. Try it out. He was using an analogy. This thing is like that. And it was a huge boon for him, talking with potential users, getting feedback, explaining to his team, his designers. This is the size, this is the weight. This is actually the kind of level of simplicity I'm looking for. If you're gonna put a disk drive on it, where is it gonna go? What part of it is it gonna fit on? Why is that worth using some of our limited real estate for? So having an analogous prototype like this really helped him. So today we talked about the value of prototyping, why to do it, and then methods. We talked about storytelling, sketching, storyboarding, modeling, the Wizard of Oz method, video simulation, skits and role-playing, and analogous prototyping.
