From paper prototype to lean start-up

The word prototyping is often associated with product design, and then particularly in car design. The big car brands proudly present their newest prototypes on annual car fairs as the next big thing. With these prototypes they often want to show us their set out strategy for the upcoming years. But only few prototypes are actually put into production. Think of how BMW uses a unified numbering system for both its production cars and its prototypes and concept cars, resulting in numbering gaps when one looks at its production cars only (i.e. the admired BMW E21 3-series was followed up by the E23 7-series car, leaving the E22 out, a prototype that never went into commercial production). Prototyping however is an absolute must in so many other industries, ranging from fashion and civil engineering to software development. And it can happen both in lo-fi and hi-fi ways, depending on the stage of the design process.

Paper prototyping

One of the most lo-fi ways to start prototyping is by doing paper prototyping. Probably you’ve already done it yourself many times, when trying to explain or communicate an idea and you noticed using only words couldn’t express your thoughts well enough. And then there was the back of the beer coaster that served as a blank canvas for some scribbles. This is where the first prototyping efforts start and it’s a powerful instrument not only to express your idea to others, but also to make it more clear for yourself. I enjoyed reading the book ‘The Back of the Napkin’ by Dan Roam, which demonstrates how thinking with pictures can help you discover and develop new ideas.

Paper prototyping in product design
One step further than prototyping with a beer coaster is taking out your paper, scissors, some glue and a magic marker. I remember from my own education in Product Design how in our very first class we had to paper prototype a bridge in the most sturdy way we could, using only the creative materials we used back in kindergarten. By folding paper girders and glueing them to the base of our paper bridge it turned out the bridge could withstand several kilos, while it was only made out of paper! This experiment proved the importance of prototyping in early stages of the design process.

Paper prototyping is not only a fast method, it also gives you freedom in ideation.

Paper prototyping in service design
A few years ago the book ‘Business Model Generation’ by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur was published, which is a handbook for people striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. This highly poplular book presents the so-called Business Model Canvas, which is a direct example of how also new business models can be prototyped in a quick and dirty way, similar to the paper bridge we had to build. The Business Model Canvas in a way tests the viability of a new business case before executing it. Practices such as Service Design have received great attention ever since, and nowadays there are many specialists giving workshops in Service Design and rolling out change-management programs based on Service Design methodologies in which they use prototyping tools such as the Business Model Canvas.

Paper prototyping in digital design
We’re currently busy designing the CloudTeams platform, and in our field of expertise—digital design—tools such as paper prototyping are just as necesssary as in other design industries. By means of cutting paper sheets into windows, boxes, tiles and cells, we can experiment with how elements on web pages should behave, and which animations and transitions result in the set out user experience. Paper prototyping for digital design is not only a fast method, it also gives you freedom in ideation, something that i.e. wireframing software such as Axure doesn’t give you at first—how powerful this software may be in later stages of the design process.

Lean software development

The value of prototyping has recently shifted to a more abstract level in both software and business development. One could see the whole creation process of new software development, or even the foundation of a new start-up as a whole, as one big prototyping effort. This is often referred to as Lean Software Development, executed by Lean Start-ups. While the term Lean Start-up has suffered a bit over time by being interpreted as start-ups or initiatives that in fact don’t have any budget or funding to reach their goals—therefore cutting out resources that are in fact necessary and calling the resulting approach as being Lean—the approach at the core is something I truly believe in. Only by continuous dialogue with your audience, and testing your intermediate results over and over again, you learn if your new software service actually solves a problem for your audience, and therefore is a viable business case. In fact, with our very own design agency we once made the mistake to keep our web platform, which of course we loved so much, from our audience until it was finished including all the icing on the cake, only to discover afterwards it wasn’t the next big thing that we thought it would be.

Working in agile cycles
To work towards intermediate prototypes that you can test and discuss with your audience, it’s often good to work in so-called Agile Cycles. These are work sprints in which you and your team work on an agreed set of functionalities with a fully working prototype at the end of the sprint. To see which functionalities are feasible within the time scope of the sprint you create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which is basically a list of functionalities that are absolutely necessary for your product to work. Often you need both designers and developers to make time estimations for the creation of the different functionalities, to make sure your MVP is actually feasible.

Only by continuous dialogue with your audience, you learn if you have a viable business case.

Testing, testing and then some more testing…
Before you know it you will find yourself in a continuous dialogue with your target audience. One way you might want to test your prototype is by doing A/B-testing, which means you present your audience two different solutions for a certain required functionality, and ask them which one they prefer. If you do this for every isolated functionality, you’ll end up with a string of favored solutions that you can take into the next Agile Cycle to elaborate into a next prototype. It’s really just a matter of testing and then some more testing. If you feel you need more context of why your test participants choose for certain solutions, it might come in handy to organize a focus group. By having multiple test participants in the room at the same time, and by talking about how they experience your prototype, you elicit discussion and you get to know the more subtle differences between their individual user experiences. Subsequently, this will let you gain more empathy for your target audience, by which you can make better informed decisions on how to optimize your beloved ‘darling’.

Final words

Most of the practices above are not new. I’m sure BMW did plenty of user testing and research when designing their compact family sedan E21 3-series back in ‘75. But maybe the fact that the internet nowadays empowers so many people to set up new software services and giving them the ability to do user testing in early stages, the process of prototyping and user testing has been professionalized and has become more methodological. This in return gives you the tools to innovate using a solid approach from making your first paper prototype on a beer coaster to being a Lean Start-up that creates the next big thing on the web.

We are currently building CloudTeams, a platform that facilitates the conversation between developers and their audiences during the early stages of the design process. Have a look here if you want to learn more about CloudTeams.