The Power of Prototyping

A prototype is the best place to start building your project. I’ll introduce you to the meaning  of prototyping and why I think it is so tremendously important. This is going to serve as a framing for later that we’ll use to introduce concrete techniques.

Today when we talk about prototyping, what we mean is rapidly creating an approximation of a design idea so that you can quickly get feedback and learn. Prototyping is the pivotal activity in structured innovation, collaboration and creativity in design. Prototypes embody design hypotheses and enable designers to get feedback.

It’s what Donald Schon calls “a reflective conversation with materials”.By trying things out and learning from that exploration you are able to improve your design and be able to gain insights that you otherwise may not have.

It’s important to remember that the goal in prototyping is not the artifactit’s feedback: Build some prototypes, try them out, and usually you’d learn to try to in the next design. One way to think about a prototype is that it’s a question rendered as an artifact.

It’s something that you make as a way of communicating with other stakeholders:

These can be clients.

These can be other people on your design team.

These can be users in an interactive system.

They can even be yourself.

And the role of the prototype in this communication is it serves as a common ground to help people understand really concretely what everybody is talking about. 

prototype kodak’s first consumer digital camera 

Here’s an example of what I mean by a prototype, courtesy of the design firm IDEO In the mid-90’s,Kodak approached IDEO, asking them to help design an early consumer digital camera.

Digital cameras were a very interesting technology, because they offered new opportunities for being able to review and edit your photos on the camera that wasn’t possible with the film camera.

                                                        

IDEO was tasked with a way to make sense of possible interactions that you could do on a digital camera and to render those on a concrete user interface. 

What they came up with ultimately became this the Kodak DC-210 digital camera. Here’s the user interface of camera.There’s a screen and several buttons for being able to navigate through the photographs. It also has a dial for several modes and a zoom controller. Now let’s look at the prototype.You’ll probably notice some similarities but also some differences. The prototype on the screen and the final product both have buttons. They have a screen. They are of similar functionalities in this case.

However, there’re also some important differences between this prototype and this final version. The first one is that the prototype is a lot bigger.In order to be able to build a version quickly they couldn’t make everything miniaturized. So it takes more a lot more physical space the layout is similar but the scale has changed.

Second, one of the most important things about a digital camera is that you be able to take it with you as it is mobile.This prototype camera here had an umbilical cord going back to a Macintosh that actually ran all of the computations and interactions,so there were no computation on the device itself.

And finally this was a prototype of a digital camera where you couldn’t take pictures. There’s no lens there’s no photographic elements in this prototype it’s purely a way to understand better the back of camera interactions for reviewing and editing photos.

And I think this is a really important point about prototypes.It’s that prototypes nearly always are and ought to be incomplete.

To pop back up from that example:

Prototyping is a strategy for efficiently dealing with things that are hard to predict.And these hard-to-predict things are both things that you wonder whether there’ll be an issue but don’t know what the answers’s going to be — your “known unknowns — and the things that you don’t know, that you never got to think about — those are your “unknown unknowns”.

And what’s valuable about prototyping is it helps you to get feedback quickly, so you don’t spend time heading down the wrong path. If you’ve ever taken an art class you’ll know the experience of sketching before you make a painting. It’s not just for novices: Picasso did the same thing.

One of the things that we know about human psychology is that people are notoriously bad at being able to estimate the space of possible outcomes. We often consider far fewer options than are actually likely to happen. And this is just as true in the financial world as it is in the creative world.

For any complex system whether it is finance or design the interactions of all these ingredients far dominate the things that you can easily predict and consequently our intuitions are often wrong.

The strategy that we are going to teach you in this article is to encourage you to focus on the goals of the design rather than to think about a particular design itself and trying to railroad that strategy forward.

A classic novice error is to come up with one idea for a design.You think you’ve got something that’s super cool and just keep arguing for that particular option. Instead of having that concrete thing you want to argue for think about what you hope to achieve with that design idea what’s your goal there.

In class we’re going to teach how to set goals early and evolve them and revise your design using data.

As Bill Buxton points out in his excellent book “Sketching User Interfaces”, the kinds of alternatives that you’re going to consider at different points of the design process are going to be different.

Early on, you may be thinking about a really broad range of possibilities. And then you might narrow in for a little while. Then you might consider some alternatives and narrow in. And this alternating flair and focus is a hallmark of an effective design process. Later on in the design as you get toward the final product you’re  going to be thinking about  small variations like fonts or colors or micro changes in layout.

Early on you might be thinking about much broader ideas like:

Is this going to be a mobile service or a desktop service?

And what kind of thing is this going to be anyhow?

Recognizing the need for and value of this oscillation can help you prepare for an effective design process.

The Palm Pilot’s design process provides us with a wonderful example of prototyping.

The Palm Pilot was one of the first digital PDA’s(personal digital assistants)and it helped you handle your to-do lists, and calendar, and contact information and notes. Its lead inventor was Jeff Hawkins and Jeff,when he first envisioned the Palm Pilot, one of the first things that he did was create a block of wood that was the size of the device that he envisioned.

First Palm Pilot design 

And what he would do is carry this block of wood around with him and he would use it as if it were a real device: So he would tap on it and enter information, add contacts, record things in his calendar take notes furiously scribbling the whole time.

So what did Jeff and his team learn from this prototype?

Well, they obviously didn’t learn anything about the silicone or the battery life or anything of the Palm Pilot because the whole thing was made out of wood.What they learned was about the form factor and what we can see here is that this was a great example of the rights and roles that a prototype can play in the design process.

A prototype should not be required to be complete,it’s going to be incomplete in strategic and important ways.

It should be easy to change.Don’t like the size of your Palm Pilot? Just cut it off a different size.

Finally, it should get to retire that, when you move on to a later phase in the design process, you no longer need the early prototypes.

Given that we are in a class about designing computer systems and we’re talking about a block of wood you might reasonably ask,

“What’s going on here?” or maybe,

“What is it that prototypes prototype?”

And the answer is that there are several things that a prototype can prototype.

One kind of prototype prototypes the feel	“What does this look like?”
Another kind prototypes the implementation	“What might this work like?”
And yet another kind of prototype prototypes the role	“What might the experience of using this interactive system be like?”

This complete course will teach you a number of strategies that cover a bit of each of these categories.

You can plot a prototype in two dimensions. You can think about how much to learn from that prototype and you can think about how long it took you to create it. And what you want to able to do especially early on in the design process, is to be able to maximize the amount of learning that you are being able to get from  that prototype and minimize the amount of time that it is going to take you to create it. 

Remember a prototype is going to be incomplete and it’s going to be something that you are going to get rid of most likely at some point in the process, and so there’s no point in sinking a lot of time into something that you’re soon going to throw away. 

Prototyping is not just for small things. In your prototyping you can think big really big.

Here’s an example from Walter Dorwin Teague. He is one of America’s foremost industrial designers. And he is standing inside of one of the very first Boeing cross-country airplanes. And what he’s doing is taking a look at the interior design that his company did for Boeing, (and they still work with Boeing to this day). What’s notable here is that you’ve got an interior of an aircraft, but there’s no aircraft! This is all mocked up in a warehouse. It’s the experience of an airplane without the airplane.

Prototype of Boeing cross-country airplanes

In creating this prototype they brought in a number of users and had people come on with luggage and try out the experience of the airplane,where they would sit down take their seats for the length of a cross-country flight and flight attendants would come through to offer them food and other amenities, and you could see things like

“Are the aisles wide enough?”,

“Are the seats comfortable?”,

“Will the luggage racks carry the luggage that’s necessary?”

Walter Teague wasn’t the only industrial designer to be able to use these large prototypes of scale. Many of the designers creating ocean-going vessels tried the same strategy of prototyping interiors in warehouses, and in fact as Walt retail store to try out the retail experience in advance of first opening, and one of the things that that biography reports about the retail experience at Apple was by the virtue of prototyping it and trying out different configurations of the store.Apple team realized that the stores can be configured around activities such as music rather than around individual products and this significantly changed the layout of the Apple Stores prior to their opening.

Linus Pauling may be the premier chemist in the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on describing the nature of chemical bonds. What his work philosophy shares with that of professional designers is the practice of trying out multiple alternative ideas approaches and solution strategies. As he says here,

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

And we see that in a hundred different prototypes that the design firm IDEO produced for Microsoft when it was creating its first mouse. There are a number of form alternatives that it explored symmetric versus asymmetric designs ones that emphasize ergonomics versus others that emphasize style and being able to see all of these alternatives and hold them in one’s hand helped Microsoft figure out which design was the best fit for it to release the mouse with.

For the geeks in the audience: You can think about this kind of rapid prototyping strategy that we’re talking about as being kind of like simulated annealing, where you have a space of possible options,some of them better than the others and what often happens with serial iterative design is that you can hill climb to the best one.

But local improvement isn’t enough.You need to be able to hop around the design space and try wildly different  alternatives. That way you can find the global maximum.

When you’re creating a prototyping strategy, it’s important to think about the cost of change over time. For physical products  like a car, a toaster, the cost of making changes rises dramatically over time throughout the design process and even more significantly upon release.

With desktop software that gets distributed on say a CDROM, the cost rises aren’t quite so dramatic, but it’s still pretty significant harder to make changes as you go throughout the design process and much more difficult once you’ve shipped it out to consumers.

 Web sites, and other forms of software as a service make it much easier to make changes over time. But the costs and difficulty of making changes is still increasing for a number of reasons. One of the most important is that people get used to a particular piece of software over time. And so even if you could change it easily you’d upset and confuse a significant user base. The same is true for developers of any software that has API’s that people are writing applications on top of.

Once people get used to it, or have built things that rely on a piece of software, it becomes more difficult to change. Altogether, what this means is that you want to create a design process where you’re making your biggest changes early and as you build momentum with users you’re continuing to refine and adapt and tweak and improve your system as it goes on.

I think I can sum up the introductory message of this framing lecture in one sentence:

It’s that “prototypes

are questions;

ask lots of them.”