- Products and services today often exist
beyond a single screen or the edges of a physical product.
They exist in spaces, in environments,
in journeys over time.
Journey mapping and low fidelity prototyping
are great ways to make concepts tangible
over time and in hand.
But when you move beyond the scale of the hand,
you need to start prototyping in spaces.
Experiences that happen in spaces or over time
are less tangible than an object you can hold,
and people often struggle with the abstraction needed
to understand an experience
that will happen in these spaces.
Prototyping experiences that happen over time
is often done with a video or performance
or other sketch techniques
and makes these experiences tangible
and allows the team and potential users
to understand them on their own terms
and articulate that understanding to others.
For example, Frog worked with a startup
rethinking how the old payphone infrastructure
could be reimagined to meet the evolving needs
of the urban landscape.
That's super abstract.
We were asking folks to imagine a world
where the payphone had been replaced
by something that would be meaningful
in a way that the cellphone,
which had replaced the payphone,
isn't.
The team needed to think about how this new object
and new experience would impact the urban landscape,
how it would be used by a wide range of people,
and how it would function under many different situations
from Hurricane Sandy to the New York marathon
as much as in everyday use.
The team made fast prototypes
to explore all those questions.
From rough foam core models taken onto the street
to see how the scale plays out
to rough mock-ups of the screens
that were shared with potential users
to talk about how the service would work
and even a video showing how the service could change
in different situations and lots more along the way.
When you're making to explore a service or experience
that's happening beyond the scale of the hand,
your laptop, or your phone,
consider these four things.
The first is people.
Think about the range of people who will be in the space
and the needs, perceptions, and behaviors
they'll bring to that experience.
The second is flow.
This is the movement of people and other factors
through the experience.
This will often involve observation
and thinking about factors as diverse as weather
or end of shift's changes in staff.
You also want to think about the objects in the space.
Those are the physical elements of the space
including both those that you're going to create
as part of the design effort
and those that are existing or will be introduced
in the future into the space.
The fourth are the situations.
This is the meaning and intentions of the existing space
and why the new experience exists
and how it will be in used.
Prototyping becomes increasingly important
as teams need to explore ideas
with tangible models that allow for flow, scale,
and consideration of the situation to be explored.
Teams are often tempted to jump towards
greater and greater specificity
as they start making larger and larger experiences,
but just as in low fidelity prototypes,
the goal is to keep the prototype a sketch,
something raw that can be quickly changed
and iterated by the team.
Use foam core over metal
or a performance over a coded interaction
and get real people in and encourage them
to change things with you.
Experiences that happen over time
do need to be expressed clearly
with journey maps, story boards, and other tools
that are all very useful,
but when the experience goes into a space,
a city street, a retail environment, or a theme park,
it's necessary to sketch in 4 dimensions
those models and their use over time.
When you're designing for experiences that happen
in a particular environment,
make sure you get off the paper and off the whiteboard,
and go prototype in scale.
Go build something.