Preparing to Prototype

Now that you’ve begun testing your ideas, it’s time to further flesh out your product vision. Synthesizing your insights and observations on paper is the next step toward creating light prototypes.

From Brain to Paper

Before creating visual prototypes or sketches, it’s useful to start with some exercises designed to make sure you’re focused on how your product or service might actually be used. These exercises help direct your thinking toward how people will experience your product or service. Once you’ve gotten a lot of ideas on paper and begun sketching out the seeds of your solution, additional exercises use digital tools to add interactivity to your sketches. Once you’ve got some preliminary ideas, solution sketches and mockups, you’re in a position to test them out and gather input. That will help point you in the direction of next steps in refining and building upon your initial ideas.

4-Column Concept Map

The first exercise in this direction is to draw four columns on a piece of paper. You’ll be exploring four perspectives on the subject you’re focused on: context, pain, pleasure and behaviors. In each column, you’ll write down short phrases, bullet points or lists of words. To illustrate how this works, let’s assume that we’re focused on addressing the opportunity to fill in gaps in the local news scene in Barcelona, Spain. When you do this exercise, use the problem or solution that you yourself are exploring.

Title the first column CONTEXT. Under this heading you’re going to spend two minutes writing down every time and place you can think of in which someone is concerned with this topic. When are they thinking about this, reading about this, watching this, engaging with this. In our example, people are concerned about local news in Barcelona in the following contexts, among others: sitting at home over breakfast, commuting to work, at lunch at work, commuting home from work, when considering moving to Barcelona, when visiting Barcelona as a tourist, when there’s a local conflict, when there’s a major local weather, traffic or crime incident. This list could go on and on. Get the idea? These are contexts, i.e. situations or moments, when this problem/solution is relevant.

The second column is titled PAIN. Below that heading jot down bullet points about how the topic you’re addressing is associated with challenges, frustrations, or painful experiences. For instance, if you’re exploring the local news landscape in Barcelona, you might include bullet points about situations in which people are frustrated by a lack of awareness about roads that are blocked off after a storm, or public buildings closed for repairs. Or they might be struggling to find information about local schools, government services or other things they need to know. Or they might be irritated to have to wait for a newspaper in the morning to get an update on breaking news in their community.

The third column is for PLEASURE. This is where you note positive experiences you’ve had with this topic, or heard about directly from others. Maybe there’s an outstanding example of a local site you love. Or perhaps you found out about a great event through a local news service that you used when traveling recently. This is a column where you list ways in which the kind of service you’re envisioning can be a source of smiles, enjoyment or satisfaction.

The final column is for BEHAVIORS. What VERBS do you associate with this topic. What actions are relevant? What do people do that’s relevant to this topic and to engaging with it day to day? Examples could include the following: Search, listen, watch, read, text, wait, ask friends, talk to colleagues, talk to their children, ask officials, ask journalists, etc.

Once you’ve jotted down these four columns worth of words and phrases, you’ve begun the process of putting onto paper some of the ideas, observations and key concepts sparked by your understanding of the topic you’re addressing. That four-column concept map will come in handy as you experiment with solutions to address market problems/opportunities.

[Footnote: Thanks to Luke Miller, UX Director at National Geographic, for sharing with me and my students a version of this exercise].

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How Might We…

The three most important words you can utter when dreaming up something new are “how might we…?” (HMW). Those words convey an openness to diverse approaches, emphasizing the objective. That allows for creativity about the path forward. Rather than launching a conversation about “what style of site should we build?”— which presumes it’s a site that you need—consider starting out with the question “how might we reach our community in ways that fit in with their current media consumption habits?” That more open question leaves open multiple possible paths and allows for brainstorming about various alternatives.

Before developing a prototype, posing HMW questions helps clarify what you’re aiming to accomplish. First used by Proctor and Gamble in the 1970s, it is now a common approach employed at IDEO, Google Ventures and other leading design organizations.

The HMW process temporarily shelves the question of what the solution looks like while you consider what needs you’re trying to satisfy. It allows you to consider and clarify the end you’re trying to reach before you explore possible means. That ensures that you don’t jump to conclusions about what you’re creating until you’ve determined what gaps you hope the product or service will fill.

Getting Started: Grab a stack of blank Post-Its. For the next 10 minutes, list out HMW questions related to the community you’re addressing or the problem area you’re focused on. For example, if you’re interested in helping new fathers, you might post questions like the following:

HMW reach fathers-to-be with useful information in the weeks leading up to the birth?
HMW empower fathers to share challenging experiences in a safe, supportive environment?
HMW enable experts, physicians and academics to contribute constructively to a community of fathers?

Once you’ve got a list of between five and 10 HMW questions, you’ve likely begun to surface some key objectives. You may later rank the questions in order of significance to you or to your community, ideally with input from community members. A simple method for that suggested in the terrific book Sprint is to give a few participants dot stickers and let them put them on the Post-Its that are most intriguing to them. Alternatively, you can rank the Post-Its yourself and then file the questions so you can refer back to them as you experiment with your early product/service.

Draft the Press Release

At Amazon, one of the first steps in developing a new product is drafting a press release. That’s because it helps to start with the end in mind. If you know where you’re heading, it’s easier to set a path toward that destination. If your public announcements about a product are going to focus on how cheap, easy or fast it is, your development efforts may need to concentrate on those characteristics. But if, instead, your eventual press release is likely to dwell on the product’s quality and unique design elements, your product development process may entail a different series of choices. Having a persuasive press release early on provides you with a North Star — a clear destination to target.

You’ll find lots of examples of sample press releases online to model, and guides to writing press releases, like this one from Hubspot. Here’s a simple free template in Google Docs format that you can use for this exercise. Start with a headline and a sub-hed up at the top to summarize the main takeaway message. Then being the first paragraph with an attention-grabbing opening. Use the next few sentences to summarize briefly the key things you want people to know, then include a few bullet points to summarize highlights in an easily-readable way. Provide another paragraph with additional info and then a few lines at the bottom about your organization. Try to keep the whole thing to one page so it’ll be easy to read and refer back to later.

Example: Here’s a press release from Quartz about their new Atlas platform for charts.

End Result: A document you can share and refer back to that will help communicate what kind of value people will get from your product. The press release will help you convey the why behind your venture — what’s driving you to create this product — and will help you focus attention on the user’s perspective on your product.