- Often our collective experience enables us
to quickly tackle problems with lightning speed.
When it comes to prototyping today,
we have many efficient approaches available
that make it possible to dive right in.
But if you ever dove in feeling like
you were making progress, you were headed in
the right direction, and then somehow
you went off course.
Perhaps the output was not what you expected,
and it failed to solve the problem.
In my experience, this can happen
with a well-intentioned team that didn't
spend enough time with important design activities
prior to prototyping.
Meaning they moved into prototyping
before determining what would be
most appropriate to prototype,
and the activity itself gave them
a false sense of accomplishment.
Your prototyping will be exponentially
more valuable if you carefully select
what you will be making before you start.
That business challenge or customer pain point
you're trying to solve is often like an onion,
meaning you'll peel back those layers,
and show you how to focus separately on each one.
Remember, you'll experience the highest
success rate by spending adequate time
with design thinking activities that enable you to
emphasize, define, and ideate,
because the outputs from those will help you
develop a punch list of experiments.
For example, with Honeywell Connected Home,
we designed a mobile application with a temperature control.
We focused on two discrete ways
to approach temperature setting.
How to display the felt temperature,
and how the dial responded as they adjusted the setting.
A trick I use that's a bit counter-intuitive
is choose what you'll prototype based upon
how narrowly focused each experiment is.
To do that, it's a little bit easier to imagine it
since it's counter-productive.
Imagine you're trying to hit this breadth,
and what you'll usually do,
if you look at it this way,
is you'll start down here, but see how
you're actually overlapping,
and while you might feel like you're going broad,
you're not really having contrasting ideas
that cover the breadth, that don't have a lot of overlap.
So by staying up here narrowly focused,
you'll be able to hit a much better contrast and depths.
So to do that, choose a well-defined business
or customer pain point and break it down
as far as you can.
Get all that logical thinking out of the way.
Then focus on ways you might approach
the challenge, like we did with the temperature setting,
moving from one idea to another rapidly
so you avoid going too deep.
But what do I mean by going too deep?
Let's say you're creating an application
for many people to perform tasks
to complete different goals,
so you have many series of related tasks called workflows.
You'd go deep by really just fleshing
one of those details out, and instead cover
many functional flows broadly.
Oh, and going off course here can actually
help you go even broader.
Okay, now that we understand what it means,
it's valuable because this allows you
to explore several different solutions.
When you have several possible experiments,
share them as a team, keeping each share out
to one minute or less using a technique
we call timeboxing.
Group similar ones together giving extra focus
by ideally picking just one experiment from each group.
Then, feel free to dive right in.
If you end up with many groups,
rate each one, narrowing down your experiments
into three or less.
See how framing what you'll be prototyping
is more efficient than determining this during prototyping?
This also allows us to use prototyping
to think laterally if we need to.
Lateral thinking is the art of reframing questions
and breaking assumptions, leading to breakthroughs.
Performing these activities together
also fosters a highly collaborative design team.