[MUSIC] Welcome to prototyping and product ideation. My name is Dr. Carla Harris and I'll be guiding you through this module. In the next set of lessons, we're going to cover a wide range of topics around creating usable models and frameworks, whether it's a prototype or a minimum viable product, used to test and gather user feedback. It's critical to test early and often before you spend a lot of time and money getting something out to the market that no one wanted in the first place. To kick it off, in this lesson, we'll be discussing what we mean by prototype. We'll look at the principles of prototyping and some common prototyping methods. We'll also take you through some common pitfalls of prototyping because there are a few. We'll encourage you to apply prototyping in a business environment or to a particular business problem. Prototyping is all about developing a representation of your solution in a way that gives users and testers the opportunity to experience, test, and play around with the solution. A prototype is not necessarily functional, but it does need to be something that can generate meaningful feedback from your users or testers. Prototyping helps you validate your assumptions. It also ensures that product developers haven't become bogged down in the data and the artifacts that have been gathered during the research phase of your project. Prototyping helps focus the developer on usability. It tests whether the solution actually meets the need, as identified in the problem definition statement. Now, let's quickly cover the differences between a prototype and a minimum viable product, or MVP. Whilst both are used to validate assumptions, prototypes are usually developed before an MVP. A prototype is designed to test the feasibility of a solution or part of a solution, whereas an MVP is the minimum stage in functionality that a solution can be at in the market. For the purpose of this course, we'll focus mostly on prototypes and touch on MVPs in a later lesson. Prototypes are generally broken down into high fidelity or low fidelity. High fidelity prototypes are realistic examples of your end product, the user can interact with. Low fidelity prototypes are generally visual representations, sketches, or drawings of your end product. They're not interactive and are much more basic. We'll go into greater detail on high and low fidelity prototypes later on in this module. Prototyping can be a fun, exciting activity. It's really exciting when you have something tangible to put in the user's hands and get feedback on your ideas. There are a few common pitfalls you need to avoid. Firstly, getting incredibly invested into your first prototype. The first prototype you create will seem amazing. It's the first tangible solution that you have developed and you will probably receive positive feedback from your colleagues, users, and stakeholders. But remember, the aim of a prototype is to test your solution. Encourage robust, considered, and critical feedback, and try not to get too defensive. It's only with genuine feedback that you can truly have an amazing product. The second trap is becoming a serial pitcher or idea explainer. Entrepreneurs, innovators, and strategists generally like talking, generating solutions, and explaining how their idea is truly amazing. But the downside of this is that sometimes they don't dedicate enough time to prototype development, testing, and iterating, based on the feedback you obtain, which is the whole premise behind design thinking and design strategy. Pitching and explaining your idea is great. However, showing someone your solution is truly outstanding. Embrace the process of prototyping, show people your solution, listen carefully, and learn from them. Then continue and repeat the process. A third pitfall is fear of failure. Prototyping will undoubtedly lead to insecurities and a fear of failure. Why? Well, after all, you're asking colleagues and strangers alike to pick apart the solution that you've invested your time and talent to create. And believe me, pick it apart they will. The point of prototyping is to ensure ideas will work and to validate the assumptions made when conceptualizing the ideas. It's an incredibly important exercise in ensuring that before you invest a stack of time and money, that your initiative is actually addressing the problem or filling the intended need. So again, embrace this, and re-frame your mindset to think, what could I learn from prototyping? And also remember, after a few prototypes, you look back on your first one, and be so proud of how far your idea has come, and how much closer you are to a winning solution. Finally, be aware and wary of being dismissive of prototyping. Constantly developing prototypes sometimes feels a bit tiresome, particularly if you're stuck on pitfall number one, and are wedded to your initial prototype. You may start to consider multiple prototypes are a waste of time, money, and resources, or even that prototyping is slowing down the development process. The opposite is actually true. Prototyping helps you build an outstanding product more quickly and more effectively in the long run. Through prototyping, you rapidly can get a great understanding of how your idea will unfold and refine the product before it goes to market. So keep going, as the benefits are truly powerful. Now let's talk about the different ways of prototyping. There are endless methods of prototyping, only limited by your imagination. But some of the most common methods of prototyping are physical models, sketches and drawings, storyboarding, and role playing. So let's take a look at these. The most common method of prototyping is physical models. These are tangible models of your imagined end product. Some physical models are static, others are interactive, and others actually have fake functionality. So, for instance, you haven't quite finalized your code for an app or a website, so you've developed a manual system to demonstrate an automatic end function. Sketches and drawings are one of the simplest forms of prototyping. This allows you to illustrate your concept, how it interacts with other solutions or problems. They are also useful when developing technology-based interfaces, what functionality you want on a screen, how you want to lay it out. You can draw it without having to code it all up and develop it. If you were to prototype your customer journey, you may consider designing a storyboard prototype. Visually demonstrate your customer journey and how your solution would interact with the customer. Role playing is all about exploring scenarios in a physical manner. Capturing and addressing the users emotional experience in a simulated environment. Uncovering and empathising with your users and their problem is an essential component of design strategy. And role playing requires robust customer personas and empathy mapping. So make sure you've done them first before going down this path. Now that we've covered some of the most common methods of company developed prototypes, let's take a quick look at user driven prototyping. User driven prototypes are probably the most interesting prototype method. Here, it's all about asking users to develop their ideal prototype. This would probably occur during a focus group style activity, and we'll give you deep insight into how your customers would see their ideal product. With all of these options, you might be unsure which one to use. But other times, it might be really obvious what kind of prototype you might want to build to start off with. But if you are stuck, perhaps start brainstorming around questions such as, what are the key things you want to test? And what is your idea ultimately about? But essentially, it's important to just get stuck in and have a try. So now you know what prototyping is. We've looked at some of the principles of prototyping and some common prototyping methods. I hope you are now aware of some of the common pitfalls of prototyping, too. So go out there, have fun, and start prototyping. [MUSIC]
