- You've come up with great ideas
for how you can solve the problems you uncovered.
Now it's time to show those ideas
back to your potential customers
to see how well you interpreted and solved their issues.
Of course, just telling them a story
based on your scenarios isn't likely to work.
They may visualize something completely different
from the solution you were thinking about.
Then, when you're done building it,
they'd be upset that you didn't give them
the thing they'd envisioned at the beginning of the process.
The answer is to build a paper prototype
of the user interface your scenario describes.
You'll have to design all the screens
for your product anyway later in the process.
Doing it now, in a quick sketch format,
is an ideal opportunity to find out
whether your design ideas are likely to work
for your user base.
Just step through your storyboards
and create interface screens that handle
each part of the interaction.
If your storyboard had a step
where the persona searched for something,
you need to ensure your interface contains a search box.
If your scenario uses geolocation,
you need to build the interface where users turn it on
or interact with it.
I like to create these screens using the same
sticky notes and pens that we used
for all the previous stages.
It's amazing how creative you can be
just with a few initial elements.
Sticky notes are easy to reposition,
so when you get further through your scenario,
and realize you needed to add another option
to one of your earlier screens,
it's easy to just peel and restick everything.
Build all the little in-between screens too.
These are the ones that normally get ignored
until after you've started coding.
As you build your prototype,
you'll start uncovering issues.
It's much better to solve them now, as a team,
before you start the expensive task of writing real code,
and it's down to an individual developer
to find a fix that might not be quite so optimal.
What you'll get from this process
is a set of paper screens.
These screens are the end result
of your design thinking exercise.
You've moved from observing the problem
through to building a paper based solution.
Now it's time to make sure that solution works
for your intended audience.