Application Task #2: Define Your Prototyping Strategy
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- Create an overall prototyping strategy. Ask yourself: How could a low-fidelity prototype for my idea look like? How could a high-fidelity prototype look like?
- Build several (low-fidelity) prototypes and share them within your startup team or other collaborators. Improve the prototypes together.
- Setup feedback sessions with potential users and customers.
- Analyse and make sense of the feedback you have collected.
- Iterate your prototypes.
- Avoid design fixation. Ask yourself: Am I “defending” my idea or am I open to feedback and market data, which might point me in a different direction?
- Reflection exercise: Share your strategy, your prototypes and the feedback you have gotten with your peers.
Resources
- Read Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn Pulse article “If There Aren’t Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late!” on the iterative improvement of prototypes and the “embarrassment” you might sometimes feel while test a “crappy” early prototype.
- The following academic paper gives a good account of why building and sharing multiple prototypes at the same time is beneficial: Dow, S. P., Glassco, A., Kass, J., Schwarz, M., Schwartz, D. L. & Klemmer, S. R. (2010). Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 17(4), 127-153.
- If your idea contains a service-component, check out “3 Tips to Help You Prototype a Service” by Melanie Bell-Mayeda.
- Find out more about how to avoid design fixation in this paper: Youmans, R. J. (2011). The effect of physical prototyping and group work on the reduction of design fixation, Design Studies. 32, 115-138.