Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Natalia Tsymbalenko

Take your scrappy paper prototype and learn from real people whether they need your solution

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Do you feel that your idea is not yet complete? It’s time to show it and have a discussion about it with someone who can provide you an honest feedback. Reduce waste, don’t polish something that might won’t bring value to people you are designing for.

In the previous lessons on prototyping I have shared how have built on each other ideas within our design team by sharing our rough prototypes with each other. If you have done that part, I assure you, you are ready to get out the building and test the prototype with people who are quite dispassionate about how many hours you have spent on what you are presenting to them 😉

Preparing for prototype testing

As a part of the course from +Acumen on prototyping, I have an assignment to test service prototype, so here is what I needed to do in order to prepare the prototype for testing:

Recruit the user

Start early with recruitment, it takes time to find relevant users and agree on on the meeting time. Another approach that I have used for this project -guerrilla user testing — quick and dirty.

For the first round of testing, I have asked a few acquaintances that are close enough to my target user. We are designing a digital product/service solution for postpartum moms. I have recruited moms with the kids 3+ years old, which is not our target user for the product, but they do know what’s like to be a postpartum mom.

2. Decide what you will test

What are you trying to learn and why?
What do you think might be most desirable to the people you are designing for?
What motivates people to get engaged in the service/product?

For this project, I wanted to test the most untested assumptions, such as will mom use this type of products? will mom be comfortable with services that the product provides?

3. Prepare supporting tools

I have used a paper prototype

A paper prototype for 2 target users

You can use not only a prototype but some interaction scripts (in case of service).

Running the prototype testing session

I have run 3 sessions, roughly each for 10 minutes and learned more than few months that I have spent on ideation and idea selection.

What I did during the session:

Introduce to design process

Describe the problem that you are trying to solve, explain the objective for the session — get an honest feedback whether the prototype addresses the need

2. Walk-through the prototype

Describe the actor and the flow and read the cues from the participant.

3. Get feedback

What worked?

what was exciting? what did you value the most? what resonated with you about the idea?

2. What didn’t worked?

what would you change? where there suggestions for improvement? what did you learn that will make it better?

Pay special attention to the answers below. These should inform the changes you want to make in your prototypes.

3. What questions came up?

what needs further investigation? what made you curious?

4. What new inspiration arose?

what surprised you? what might you try next?

Well, the current prototype has some serious issues with the value proposition.

The biggest takeaway from the prototype testing are:

Test early and often (I know, cliche)
Paper would work perfectly
Don’t commit to your idea, your audience might not going to need it.

The biggest “Aha” moment:

one of the assumptions that I didn’t intend to test during this round got invalidated several times. Moms are reluctant to reserve professional postpartum services

The most exciting part of this prototype week:

actual testing! it was a fun to see a reaction of the people who never got exposed to the idea before, while I have spent 10 months on the project!

Read next post where I will share how we are progressing with prototyping and testing solutions with earlyvangelists.

This is a post from series #productdesign where I practice product design and customer development.

Follow me to see product design journey from scratch.

Prototyping lesson #4: Get out of the building and learn was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prototyping lesson #4: Get out of the building and learn

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