Before investing lots of time and resources into your ideas you want to make sure you test them with the people who are going to use your process, service or product. It helps you avoid wasting time, money and energy on building big things that donât work.
In digital service design we call this this testing prototyping.
A prototype is an early, cheap sample to test a concept and to act as the âthingâ to be learned from. It is a tool for bringing ideas to life so you can test them to learn if they work. It could be as simple as some drawings on paper or some PowerPoint slides that stand in for a website.
Photo of a person drawing wireframes by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash
âIf you test early on in your project youâll be able to be more flexible to respond to feedback at this time. During testing you want to involve many people to take on comments, ideas, suggestions. Itâs easy to tweak things at this stage as you havenât spent much time on it and youâre in the mindset of constantly tweaking and learning.
This is an early prototype from 2005 of what became the iPhone
âIf a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetingsâ IDEO
A prototype helps you find problems early
Finding problems at this stage is much cheaper and less stressful than when when youâve already invested lost of time and resources.
It gets you user feedback early on
Testing parts of your process or service that are a little rough round the edges is far more likely to gather open and honest user feedback than something that feels finished.
It builds shared understanding
Once an idea has taken on a form the team can gather around it. Allowing them to interrogate it and share their thoughts in meaningful and tangible ways.
It can help with stakeholder buy-in
A prototype can go some way to articulating the potential value to senior stakeholders to unlock budget.
1. Decide on the idea you need to test
- Make a list of your riskiest elements about your ideas. Which assumptions need to be accurate for the solution to work? What are the most critical criteria for success?
- Keep each prototype simple. The most common mistake is to go too large and try to test the whole solution in one go. Instead:
- Test one element of each solution at a time
- Ask only one question at a time - each test will provide data that will add to your bigger picture
- Check what already exists. It will inspire you and could reveal an existing service you could test, or show you donât need to develop something at all. See the practical guides in next steps for inspiration.
2. Start making
- Create multiple variations of each prototype, each one being slightly different. This way you can iterate more quickly by swapping them around as you test. This will generate more feedback.
- Keep it simple and basic to start with. If a prototype looks rough and ready rather than polished youâll get more honest feedback. Because people prefer not to criticise things that look like theyâve had a lot of effort put into them.
3. Test
- Put your prototypes in front of the people who will use your process, service or product and watch how they interact with them.
- Use a combination of observation, conversation and questions to gather feedback.
- Make sure the people you test with understand you are interested in their honest opinion, to help you design something that is useful to them.
- Test multiple versions of prototypes alongside one another. This encourages conversation and comparison and leads to more useful feedback. For an example of this see the short read in next steps below.
4. Collate your learning, iterate your idea and repeat
- Synthesise your learning - pull out the themes and insights from the testing.
- Create some quick iterations to your ideas.
- Test again.
- Repeat till youâve learned what you need to be confident to move forward to implementing your idea/s.