Prototyping

Making to Think, to Learn, to Tell a Story

Making prototypes is good for designers and non-designers. Making engages more of your brain - and lends tangibility to ideas we agree on in principle, but question in practice. Prototypes drive behavior - and what people do is far more important than what they promise.

Prototyping Station

Part of building a great prototyping culture is giving employees everything they need to think and build quickly.

Quick Iterations

The advantage of prototypes is the lower the fidelity, the quicker a team can iterate and gain new behavioral insights - accelerating learning.

Co-Design

Prototyping with customers is such a great way to bring down the walls between product and customers to encourage real dialog and observe body language and emotions.

Prototyping as a facilitation device

Prototypes can also foster discussions and collaboration within a team or across functions.

Diagramming workflows

These quick sketches of how a customer completes tasks provide snapshots of behavior beyond the software we can refer to later.

Teaching Moments

Prototypes foster rich dialog about a variety of approaches to the same problem.

Collaboration Prototypes

Taking brainstormed ideas and contextualizing them on a customer journey.

Storyboards

These sequenced frames tell the story of a customer journey in bite-sized moments.

Whiteboard Prototypes

Iterating on UI in a very nimble way - draw, photograph, edit, photograph, edit again.

Teaching Skills

I encourage non-designers to build their confidence by running quick workshops like this one: drawing stick figures to tell stories with confidence.

Intern Assignment

Making to think takes practice and repetition, so I challenged an intern to prototype something every day for a month.

Behavior trumps words

Getting customers to interact with your prototype, physically, reveals all kinds of insights about their expectations, their attitudes, and their understanding.