- Have you ever had a hunch?
When designing, we spend most of our effort
on a few hunches at most.
Frequently, this is because we only have time
for so many concepts,
or some other constraint is present.
The problem is we often place all our bets on one concept,
and sometimes we're wrong.
More often than not, we're half right,
and you need to make adjustments.
To avoid spending too much time with one untested concept,
use lightweight prototyping to enable
rapid and iterative experimentation.
This rapid delivery will get you
to the next design steps faster.
When you're prototyping to learn,
you'll wanna structure your design plan
using several short cycles.
That way you can apply what you've learned
to the next step.
Timeboxing can help keep you moving quickly
by allocating a fixed time period called a timebox
to each planned activity.
Making your concepts real and in quick successions
ensures that the design activities
will be fast and laser focused.
Imagine your team has been tasked with
reimagining a customer journey
involving multiple touch points
with digital and physical products.
You could approach it by making
several broad assumptions up front based on your research,
then design around those, document the desired journey,
and finally deliver your designs hoping they are valid.
You're a nimble designer, though,
so instead you plan a little
and prototype to make better decisions.
Then, you just repeat,
evolving the design as you march
towards your final solution.
So, let's be nimble
and play through this as if you're creating a design plan.
You'll start by timeboxing your design cycles,
then pick a prototyping approach you're skilled with
like paper or a digital tool,
and have each design team member
select just one of the concepts.
When everyone has chosen their concept,
limit yourselves to working through it in an hour,
producing a simple example of how it could work.
Depending on the number of concepts,
feel free to structure this
with either each of you taking a different concept
or everyone working through one together within that cycle,
then giving each person a few minutes to share their work.
As you evolve the design,
you'll naturally start
to increase the weight of your prototypes.
Then you can begin to slowly lengthen those design cycles
as you refine and validate your designs.
So, continue to have hunches, but plan tight design cycles,
with rapid prototyping approaches
to learn together as you share what you've made.
These experiences lead to new design decisions
that get you to your next steps faster.