- To figure out what type of prototype you need to create,
think about the questions your team is trying to answer.
It helps me to think about these questions
as four categories of prototyping.
Sometimes we need to generate new ideas,
or convey complex interactions,
or document design intent, or perhaps learn how users
react to your ideas.
For example, at frog, we worked with Honeywell,
an American multi-national company
best known for their home and business control thermostats,
to transform their various home products
into a unified, connected home platform.
Early on, we needed to generate ideas
for how each connected product could help
the homeowner feel more at home rather than
just represent a function, like setting a temperature.
So we rapidly made some prototypes of new thermostat
interactions that focused more on emotion.
These initial prototypes turned us on
to the concept that we needed to make comfort multi-sensory
through light and touch, so now we needed to convey
more nuanced interactions.
As the connected home ecosystem took shape,
we wanted to learn about how all the parts work together,
so we introduced a mobile web prototype
to test and make design decisions.
Finally, we needed to document the new ecosystem,
so Honeywell's team could produce it,
so we created prototypes to cover some of the
functional flows of the experience.
The structure of these four categories of design experiments
align really well with UCD, or User-Centered Design,
activities and goals.
UCD is designing with the person's needs
in mind throughout the process.
These four categories of prototyping
also dovetail nicely with design thinking activities
like research, ideation, concepting,
building, and validating,
so next time your business or customer
faces an important challenge,
use these four categories to zero in on your goal.
Feel free to try it out, and leverage the course community
to learn new ways to apply them.
For example, you could use an urgent problem
that needs solving from your organization's community,
or maybe one you and your team are currently tackling.
Either way, identify which categories are a good fit,
and finally, share that specific problem
you're able to frame along with the experiments
you came up with.