Event #2: Three Important Considerations Before You Start Prototyping

I attended a webinar titled Three Important Considerations Before You Start Prototyping. It is conducted by Eugene Wong and Vivien Chan from NUS ISS. The webinar mainly covered the considerations that designers should think of before prototyping. The considerations are:

1. Which problem are you solving? → Research desired outcomes
2. How would solving it impact the customer and the business? → Identify and map opportunities
3. How do you convince stakeholders? → Prioritise opportunities

The webinar mentioned that we should use a systematic approach to optimise experimentation and prototyping efforts. While experimenting or prototyping, we should not jump to our conclusion and make sure that we are able to map the desired outcomes to our opportunities.

#1: Research Desired Outcomes

The first consideration is to research desired outcomes. As designers, we should aim to learn more about the customers’ experiences rather than their opinions on something that hasn’t happened. We should also think about the desired outcome that our customers are trying to reach when using our solution. During the webinar, the speakers played a video on The Mom Test, which talks about properly speaking to customers to allow us to learn more about the customers. Instead of talking about our ideas, we should give them the chance to share about their lives instead. We should also ask about specifics in the past, rather than generics or opinions about the future. The video also mentioned that in general, we should talk less, listen more, and also be prepared to ask the hard questions. And after the research, we could use methods such as Affinity Mapping to map out users’ responses.

This makes me relate to NM4259 class as we went taught about user research in the seminar. For my NM4259 group project, we conducted contextual inquiries. And for my individual project, I conducted prototype testing which also required me to ask the user various questions. In all situations, I had to be careful about how I structured and asked my questions as I do not want to introduce confirmation bias in the users. This is similar to what is introduced in the webinar as we should be structuring our questions to understand more about the users’ personal experiences and thoughts, rather than unknowingly guiding them to lean toward our idea or solution.

#2: Identify and Map Opportunities

The second consideration is to identify and map opportunities. As designers, we should be able to identify and map opportunities that drive toward the desired outcome. We could make use of diagramming tools in order to visualise and communicate these opportunities to various stakeholders, as well as give ourselves a clearer view of them. Being able to link customer goals and business goals is also very important.

#3: Prioritise Opportunities

The third consideration is to prioritise opportunities. We should prioritise opportunities quickly to ensure that our experimentation and prototyping efforts address the highest impact needs. By defining the problem clearly and outlining the resulting impact, we will be able to better deliver and communicate value to stakeholders. We could do so by comparing whatever is being mapped out during the second consideration and prioritise the desired outcome that we want. The speakers also mentioned that customers will definitely have a lot of desired outcomes, but we, as designers, cannot possibly deliver all as we have limited resources. The question boils down to which are the more important desired outcomes and how do we prioritise them.

This reminded me of NM4259 group project as we conducted user research, survey and had many users’ wants and needs gathered. We only had very limited time to complete the project and hence could not possibly implement everything in the project. Thus, we had to learn how to prioritise which needs or wants are more important. My team prioritised based on the severity and impact of the wants and needs as well as how much of a pain point each of them caused. We zoomed into a few desired outcomes and implemented them in our solution. I am glad that what my team did was correct as what we did seems to align with what was shared in this webinar!

Next Steps

Lastly, before the webinar ended, the speakers mentioned 2 important points:

1. Experiment to get feedback and iterate. Wash rinse repeat!
2. Apply the concept of comparing and prioritising ideas (that will impact customer and business goals) to other stages in the Design Thinking process, such as ideation

This is similar to what I learned in NM4259 as I was taught that in the Design Thinking process, as designers, we can always go back to the previous stage as we iterate. In every iteration, it is as if we “wash”, “rinse” and then “repeat” the process! I am very glad I got to experience these in my group project and individual project as every iteration I did, led to gaining a lot of learning points.