The Magic of Prototyping

Everybody needs a vacation to get away, clear the head and recharge the batteries. My family recently ventured across the pond to the United Kingdom, immersing ourselves in a rich history of castles, clansmen, kings and queens.

As the Founder and CEO of JFIVE, a design thinking and innovation consultancy, I seek inspiration from life experiences to generate new ideas and opportunities for my business and the businesses of my clients. On this particular trip, my wife decided to squeeze the Warner Bros Studio Tour into our London itinerary. She felt like it would be a fun way for the kids to get away from the hustle and bustle of cosmopolitan London and the "IPAD free" Highlands of Scotland.

Well, it turns out that I might have enjoyed the experience more than my kids. If you have not been, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in London provides an opportunity to explore the Harry Potter films. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the actual movie sets, costumes and props - revealing some secrets about the special effects that make these films so popular with kids and adults.

As a design thinking practitioner, I encourage people to quickly test their own assumptions early and often with low cost prototypes - dramatically reducing the cost of uncertainty. Prototyping enables people to spend the minimum to learn the maximum. We all know how easy it can be to fall in love with our own ideas, so depending on what we are trying to learn, prototyping can help make faster pivot, persevere and stop decisions.

Using the backdrop of my recent Harry Potter experience, I thought it might be fun to share some prototyping tools and methods for your consideration.

Sketching is one of the earliest forms of prototyping. As I strolled through the studio, I was mesmerized by all the sketches on the walls (see my picture below), evidence that ideas were changed many times before they hit the movie screen. By sketching concepts quickly and cheaply, it gets the idea out of your head so you can share them with your team for further discussion and rapid iteration. At JFIVE, we designed our Innovation Lab so that every table, wall and cabinet is a writable surface. If anyone has an idea, we want that idea out of their head so everyone else can help make it even better.

Our Head of Design, Kelly Shaw, is a master builder of mind maps to illustrate systems, process, or structure his own ideas and insights. The rest of us use different forms of sketches (physical and digital) to map various touch points that affect a customer or employee journey, searching for patterns and ways things might relate to one another. Sketching is a valuable method of prototyping because you can do it practically everywhere, with a paper and pen, or digitally with a computer or smartphone app.

Paper Prototypes are the next level of fidelity and very easy to produce. In the image below, you can see how the folks at Harry Potter studios used a form of paper prototypes to mock up physical spaces before investing significant dollars in building sets. They start with little architectural models, with all white buildings and streets, and spend many hours moving things around, collaborating and discussing the pros and cons. If you have read the books or seen the movies, Diagon Alley is a wild place but it all started here.

Technology has changed what is possible with prototyping.

Hogwarts castle needed to evolve over the course of eight films and these costs would have been extraordinary...if Hogwarts Castle was real. For the first six Harry Potter movies, all the exterior shots of Hogwarts Castle were actually shots of this miniature version (see my pic below) which sat in the middle of a huge sound stage. As technology progressed, a digital model was built for the seventh and eighth films. As new books came out, the studio could quickly incorporate them onto the digital model for testing immediately and iterate for much less cost. 

An exciting area that JFIVE is currently exploring is 3D printing. In Harry Potter, 3D printers were used to make concept mock-ups of different monsters including this giant spider which freaked out my two kids. New technologies are accelerating the time it takes to test a concept, allowing producers to be able to say “yes” or "no" quickly and keep a film on time and on budget. If they don’t like the mock-up, tweaks and changes can be made on the computer by the 3D designer and re-printed for immediate approval.

In the business environment, customer needs and expectations are changing so fast that it is critical for companies to more quickly build concepts and test them before choosing to invest precious resources required for commercialization. As we like to say - "there is no sense building something that people won't want or use".

With such a wide range of prototypes, it might be a little overwhelming at times when you and your team have to decide on what exactly to build. Here are a few things to consider to help you decide what kind of prototypes to use;

1. What’s your idea about? With your team, get started by creating a value proposition canvas or a business model canvas to summarize the key components of your idea. Who is the customer? What is the value proposition? How will it make money? What partnerships and resources are required?
2. What's your riskiest assumption?  Figure out what needs to be tested, and focus on identifying your riskiest assumptions. For instance, if you want to determine whether the size of your product is acceptable, consider building a prototype with the same dimensions as your final product -then watch your customer handle it. No need to design the color and packaging, if you know that the size is the most critical aspect.
3. What level of fidelity makes sense? For each question, think about the kind of prototype that makes the most sense and really consider the cost and time. Remember, the idea of prototyping is to learn the maximum by investing the minimum - you will probably need to create multiple versions of the prototype so really embrace the "minimum viable products" philosophy.
4. Stop thinking so much. Just do it! Do not spend forever deciding what to build, and how to build it — just go out there and start! The godfather of Lean Startup, Steve Blank once said that "No business plan survives first contact with customers", so make peace with failure being an essential ingredient in the learning process. Build. Measure. Learn.

John Vardalos is the founder and CEO of JFIVE, one of the fastest growing design thinking and innovation consulting firms in Canada. John has been featured on CBC Radio and speaks regularly at conferences and events about the need for innovation to diversify the Alberta economy.

Please contact John directly at [email protected].