Prototype testing: thinking by hand

There is an interesting design challenge, which requires teams to build a building with 20 pieces of spaghetti and tape within a specified time, and then put a marshmallow on it to ensure that the building will not collapse. Whoever has the highest job will win. Participating teams include kindergarten children, business school students and corporate executives. The result of the competition was unexpected, and the children's works won the first prize, which made the adults feel ashamed.

The planner of this activity did a follow-up study and found that when adults receive this task, they will first think about their role in the team, then discuss, start sketching, continue discussing, and finally begin to implement. Everyone is thinking about how to build a tallest and largest building. As a result, at the end of the day, as soon as the marshmallows were released, the whole building slammed.

It fell down. And how do children do it? They don't think as much as adults do, just keep trying, put cotton candy on it from time to time during the construction process, and start again immediately after falling, without any hesitation. In the end, although they didn't build the tallest building, they successfully completed the challenge.

This example shows that adults and children have different ways of thinking. When adults solve problems, they will use the experience of the brain to analyze and judge, which belongs to "thinking with the brain", but they often think too much. When you take out the best laid plans in your mind, you will find that many practical problems have not been considered. And children's thinking is intuitive, they just keep using themselves.

Practice with small hands, try and make mistakes quickly and find a solution. This is "thinking with your hands".

Look before you leap, it seems that we have been indoctrinated, but in the ever-changing Internet era, the market demand has changed before it is done. So how can we learn from the meaning of "thinking with our hands" to help us better adapt to the changes of this era? This involves what we will discuss in this class: the third step of design thinking-

Prototype testing.

As we mentioned in the last chapter, no matter what you want to design, innovate and plan, you need to start from the user's point of view, not from your own needs or technical advantages. After deeply understanding the needs of users, we can focus on the problem and know more clearly what the key direction of our design is. Then brainstorm enough ideas and choose one or more good ideas. So how to verify that these ideas are feasible? You may have thought that design thinking should be "user-centered", which is very simple and can be verified by finding feedback from users' needs.

If you only describe it orally to users, their understanding of the same thing is very different from yours, which is easy to misunderstand; Users often can't express their needs accurately. The user needs a visible scene so that he can have a picture to express his feedback. However, if you wait until you make a concrete object to verify it, it will definitely cost a lot of money.

The amount of time and resources invested, like adults in previous construction games, made similar mistakes.

So the compromise is to "think by hand", that is, to make a "prototype" in the shortest time and at the lowest cost.

What is the prototype? People in the software and Internet industries may be familiar with this word. A prototype is a simple model of a product, usually called MVP. Please note that MVP here refers to the abbreviation of minimumviableproduct. MVP represents an abstract idea as something that adults can perceive, so as to communicate with users and get feedback. The key to making a prototype is "speed" Don't spend too much time thinking and looking for materials. Everything around you can be used to make a prototype, such as cartons, cloth strips, transparent glue and so on. Even if you only have A4 paper, it can come in handy.

For example, you know VR glasses. At that time, when this product was conceived, its MVP was actually a few pieces of cloth glued into something similar to an eye mask, which was put on your head, and a pocket was designed right in front of it, so as to ensure that you could see the screen of the mobile phone through your glasses after taking it. It's that simple. Then users may give feedback, such as dizziness after wearing them for a long time, a little heavy on the front of the glasses or not wearing them firmly, and so on. Through these valuable feedbacks, designers can improve the scheme. The cost of this prototype is not high: a few pieces of cloth and tape, half an hour is enough. This is what we call the minimum feasible product.

Can the APP of mobile phone make a prototype? Of course you can. Don't limit your imagination, the prototype has no fixed form, as long as you can get feedback, it is a good prototype. Some people just draw the future APP frame by frame on a piece of paper. For example, I want to use a few pictures to express the function of WeChat circle of friends. I think it should not be too difficult.

First, draw some pictures: the first one is the interface of little red dot's circle of friends, the second one is the pictures and comments in the circle of friends, with the reminder of "You have unread messages", and the third one is the picture of you clicking on unread messages. And so on. Then you cut out a hollowed-out mobile phone model with a piece of white paper and put these pictures on it to simulate the operation of the whole circle of friends.

The software industry is used to making prototypes, because without prototypes, it takes weeks or even months for many ideas to be put into practice. But it may take a day to communicate with users using prototypes.

The concept of prototype does not only appear in the Internet age. As early as 1930s, two brothers, the founders of McDonald's, reformed the service mode through the prototype. The two brothers hope to change the traditional process of ordering food for guests and delivering food by waiters to the process of taking food directly next to guests after ordering food for guests. The most important thing in this link is the speed of food preparation, so they reduced the types of food and wanted to change the design of the kitchen. But transforming the kitchen is a big project. How to confirm that this change is effective? The two brothers drew a plan of the future kitchen on the ground of a tennis court, and found several shop assistants to simulate the process of making hamburgers. Once it is found that some seats are placed incorrectly or the division of labor is not good, they will be modified on the spot. It took them a day to find the best solution. Only in this way can people customize kitchen equipment. If McDonald's Brothers directly customized an unoptimized kitchen, how much loss would it have?

After listening to the above prototype story, are you eager to try?

If you still don't know what to do, it doesn't matter. Try it first: it's as small as drawing some ideas on a napkin with a pen, and as big as making something with some cardboard, clay and tape.

When making a prototype, we should also think about three questions:

You can also make several similar prototypes of an idea for users to compare and use and see how the feedback is.

Some friends even say, "I still have no idea." Is there a more specific and simple way? " "Here I want to introduce an easy-to-use prototype tool called storyboard. The material is very simple, a few pieces of paper and a pen are enough.

Story version was first used to make animation. The staff will first draw a frame-by-frame shot on the paper and simply present each scene. After the whole story line is sorted out, they will put the pictures on these papers together to form a storyboard and make animations according to the above contents. Storyboards are also used for prototyping. You can vividly present your ideas as the journey that users have experienced when using the product or service through several shots.

For example, once I gave training to a park management company, and the exercise topic I gave was: How to help office workers who have just arrived in Shenzhen, and it is easier to make new friends after busy work. The final idea of a group is to design an APP so that HR of many companies can organize activities through this APP.

Is that how they show it?

The first picture: I drew a girl named Wendy, who left her familiar hometown and came to Shenzhen.

The second picture: Wendy entered a company and lived a busy life.

The third picture: The park where her company is located has developed a mobile phone APP for park communication, and the HR of the company can initiate activities and training on it, such as an open training on design thinking.

The fourth picture: employees of several nearby companies also saw relevant information through mobile phones, such as where the venue is, when it will be held, and who is suitable for it. Then Wendy and other nearby office workers spontaneously participated in this training. Through this training, they not only improved their skills, but also made friends. These friends are real office workers around him, not through unreliable online dating platforms. After that, they became good friends in twos and threes and made an appointment to have dinner nearby.

This is what we call a storyboard. With these pictures, we can communicate with users easily.

The above content is mainly about how the prototype designs products and optimizes process services at work. You may think, what reference value does the prototype have for us in life? In fact, the prototype principle can be applied to every decision in our lives. For example, you want to open your own coffee shop, but it's not reliable. What should you do? Obviously, you can't throw all your savings on it. You can do a "prototype experience", such as working in a coffee shop first, to understand how the boss recruits clerks, purchases goods, maintains machines and who the customers are. Or you can do a "prototype interview" and interview the owners of different coffee shops. You should look for those who do well and those who do badly. See what's the difference between them, what problems they encounter, and think about whether they can solve them if they encounter them. The interview process can use the skills of empathy interview and observation that we have learned before.

Through prototype experience and prototype interview, you can use little time and energy to verify whether your choice is appropriate.

I shared how to make a prototype earlier. With a prototype, I will naturally do the test. However, before finding a user test, you need to do some basic homework.

The best users are real users. But we usually check with people around us first, such as your colleagues and friends. It's best to find some people who have ideas and are willing to share them, and let them give some feedback to avoid some particularly obvious mistakes. Then talk to real users, mainly for mainstream users.

Think about what you need to test before you get it in front of users. Let's take the test of a course as an example. We need to know how users feel about the overall interface layout, whether the font is friendly, whether the typesetting is clear, whether the speech speed is moderate, whether the course content is enlightening and so on. These are all things you need to communicate with users, otherwise users can't give you the answers you want. At the same time, put yourself in the other's shoes. If you are a user, can you give the most natural and authentic feedback with this prototype?

What you present is called a prototype, not a final product, and certainly not perfect. In design thinking, we encourage quick trial and error and iterative updating. When someone criticizes your work, you should accept the feedback generously. We are not here to sell products, we are here to get feedback. Avoid defending your ideas. The only person in charge is the user, not you.

Once in class, I asked my classmates to make a model around the topic: how to improve the experience of foreigners buying train tickets. A group put forward a plan to make intelligent ticket vending machines. After they made a simple prototype and shared it with others, someone commented: "Your face recognition function is not suitable for foreigners. They have just arrived in China. How can you get such data? " When the sharer heard this, he began to explain and finally succeeded in persuading the questioner. This sharer is a very experienced sales manager. What he is good at is persuading others to accept his ideas.

Such a move is out of human instinct, but it is a taboo in the design process, because many times people will only interact with your products and services, and you have no chance to explain it on the spot. You can only speak for yourself by design itself. Therefore, the feedback, opinions and suggestions given by others are all helpful to you, so that you can avoid greater losses in the future.

After getting feedback, you can rest? Of course not. Strike while the iron is hot and sort out these materials quickly. Here is a very useful tool called "feedback analysis chart" to help you clear your mind. The usage is simple. You can draw a cross on a piece of white paper or whiteboard, and then fill in the four quadrants with different feedback from users.

In the first quadrant on the upper right, write down what the user thinks is good;

In the second quadrant at the top left, write down what the user thinks needs improvement;

In the lower left quadrant, write down the user's suggestions and ideas;

In the fourth quadrant at the lower right, write down the user's questions and puzzles.

After all the feedback information is presented intuitively, you and your friends need to evaluate and discuss it, and then make a new prototype. If it is found that the requirements are wrong after analysis, it is necessary to go back to the first and second steps of design thinking.

From the past experience, designers and users often have a big gap in their views on products, which may be due to the first step: the user's insight is not enough; If the gap is not big, but the user feedback is dull, the problem may lie in the second step, and the creativity is not enough.

Therefore, the three-step method shared this time is not a linear process, but a small cycle that needs to be repeated many times. Even some designs don't have to start from the needs of users. It is possible that you suddenly have a good idea and then jump back to the first step to understand the user's thoughts.

The three steps of design thinking let you know what small puzzles are on the big puzzle of design thinking, and remind you of what is missing, rather than in the order from one to three.

To sum up, in this class, we talked about the third step of design thinking, prototype testing, including prototyping and user feedback.

Prototyping is to make a product that can get feedback at the lowest cost. We introduced the storyboard, an easy-to-use tool, and the usage scenarios of the prototype outside the product.

Regarding user feedback, we learn three points of preparation before collecting feedback and how to classify and group after collecting feedback. The real learning here is small mouth, big ears and big heart. Don't sell ideas, but accept them humbly. Getting feedback that you don't like shows that your design is a little closer to success!

After talking about the three-step design idea, you may feel that you spend the most time on user insight. Why? Because we spent two classes? Actually, it's not. In practical work, the most time-consuming part is often prototyping and feedback. Let's not ignore this step. Good design is honed through repeated revision and feedback.

& lt& lt& lt Business Notes Outside the Circle