How do you prototype and test your design ideas quickly and cheaply?

Prototyping is necessary to understand your lapses in the design. The feedback from user's experience help you to safe resources and time.

Prototyping is a process in making an Imagination into something you could see and experience. It's a process we select the best ideas and structure it into a tangible solution. When we do that, we have the ability to focus our work on that idea and make more improvement, detailing and adjustment to that prototype.

Prototype as though you think you're right, then test as though you think you're wrong! Prototype quickly and cheaply - Use pens, paper, tape and pipe cleaners if need be. If you don't think you could do that because your product/service is too complex, the watch the 'Google glass' prototype video on YouTube.

Prototyping and testing are crucial in Design Thinking because they transform ideas into tangible realities, making it easier to visualize and refine concepts. By creating prototypes, you invite valuable feedback from users or target audiences, who can interact with and evaluate the design, helping to spot potential issues early. This process ensures that the final product truly meets user needs and expectations. Added, it promotes iterative improvement, allowing designers to test, tweak, and enhance their ideas continuously. In essence, prototyping and testing are essential for turning good ideas into great, user-centered products.

As innovation facilitator of 100+ projects, I advise you to NOT TO PROTOTYPE BUT PRETOTYPE, like TESLA… FAKE IT BEFORE YOU MAKE IT ???. Pretotyping is a technique for testing - and validating ideas quickly and cheap, founded by Savoia. It involves creating a simplified version of a product or service to collect user feedback and understand market demand. It’s a non-working prototype. Pretotyping reduces the risk of failure by assessing market response early in the development process. A famous pretotyping story is how Tesla ‘faked’ their first electrical car, the Roadster, using a so-called ‘glider’ of a Lotus Elise to confront their potential customers with a ‘real car’, leading to 250+ launching customers who paid $ 5000,- in advance.

Keep it simple, because your users need to understand how it works at the most basic level. If they are confused because you've overcomplicated the prototype, you're not going to gain useful, truthful data to develop further.

There are 2D and 3D prototype. We can also categorize prototype as low fidelity, high fidelity, beta and alpha. Examples of 2D prototype are drawing, sketch, power point, digital wireframing. Examples of 3D prototype are paper fold, probes, origami, recycled materials, card board, boxes. The goal of prototyping is to learn deeper, not to entirely solve the problems yet.

A prototype is an early working model which is structured from Ideas. Testing from just imagination and bombastic words on your ideas doesn't make sense. The best is to show how the final solution in a tangible format. It could be a sketch or a Mockup done with cardboards, Storyboards, role plays, System or apps designed on a paper or even a powerpoint templates. If you can't build a rough model prototype in less than 1 hour, than you are doing it wrong.

If you were to think of simplicity you would immediately come up with fast, simple methods in prototyping. For a digital UX, you could just draw it on a paper that is the size of a phone or the size of the computer screen. Then navigate through page by page on it. For a Product prototype I refrain from using 3D printer as its time consuming and costly. Normally we use cardboards and some handy work to be done on it. Role plays another method.

We recorded a great episode of the podcast 'A Beginner's Guide to Design Thinking' all about prototyping. It has some great insight in relation to both service based business' and product design.

Prototype testing, can be done in various format. Bringing out to the real environment where the users are there and testing the rough model out could be a great strategy. A simple UX Interface can be tested with multiple lead users and get feedback form them. If we were to design a Service Prototype, we could set-up a mock infrastructure and conduct the full-on testing to see what needs to be improved. Those improvement can be done impromptu and test again to see the result.

Simply build something 2D and 3D prototypes and get out of the building as quoted by Steve Blank. Not to overcomplicate or get a perfect prototype. The learning happens with the respondents and testers. When testing, observe closely how the responses and pay attention to the words resonated most to them. Identify some patterns the moment you get several testing respondents. You will enjoy this and your learning curve will be tested here.

From a rough model to an alpha prototype. From an Alpha Prototype to a final prototype. These processes needs to go through multiple iteration through users/stakeholders feedback. Some feedbacks could be iterated directly as those feedbacks clearly identifies the need statements. At times we might need to compile those vague feedbacks and synthesize it into a need statement before reiterating.

Given the complexities of customers these days, iteration could help deepen prototype experience. Expect iteration, do not fall in love with your prototypes. Insights from your testings should be incorporated in iteration and for you to build additional prototypes (iterated/pivoted). I’d recommend multiple prototypes and this phase equally fun and adventerous!

We recorded a great episode of the 'Beginner's Guide to Design Thinking' podcast all about prototyping. You could always look it up on Spotify! ??

Check out my content and several design thinking content hashtag #paydtforward #innovationliteracy ???????? Look out also for design thinking case studies such as from Pepsi published by Harvard Business Review, my favorite elaborated case study.

In Design Thinking, it's crucial to get into a prototype as early as possible. A lot of people put so much efforts in analyzing and collecting a lot of data. Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects is IDEOs Mantra to Innovation. Thus working on a prototype quick and cheap makes will bring towards success faster.