Show Notes
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast and
Mike Parsons the CEO of
Qualitance. And today we're continuing. Our series on my favorite frameworks, my favorite tools for creating new products. And actually I have to say this one's all about rapid prototyping in this framework is actually by me.
Now I am a huge fan of rapid prototyping. It's so good in those early moments of creating something new, it can be so insightful to actually yeah. Create a prototype test that we'd use as get some very early stage feedback, so helpful. And this is kind of an emerging process and there's actually not a lot on rapid prototyping.
In fact, the guy that taught me to actually do rapid prototyping is Tom cheek. And he's like a guru, but outside of. Tom's work. There's [
00:01:00] not a lot of documentation on how to do rapid prototyping and how to innovate through this process of rapid prototyping. So today I thought like let's add a little bit more into the universe about rapid prototyping, and we're going to dive into this five-step guide that I have for when you actually are prototyping.
And this framework is so powerful because I often find that people. Get super lost when they're prototyping. So I tried to create a little bit of a guide so that you can get the most out of what can be such a powerful process. So before we dive into this, a five step plan that I have, let's set the scene, let's define rapid prototyping, kind of get it into our minds a little bit.
And then we can look at this tool. So rapid prototyping is an amazingly good way to test and validate. Yeah. Idea a notion. It could be a product, a service, a business is a great way [
00:02:00] to test it before you actually have to build it. And that's the big aha. Here. You don't have to build an entire product before you test.
You can test from day one and it's particularly good way to learn. That's using rapid prototyping. That is, it's a really good way to learn. And I would say the kind of foundation of rapid prototyping is to solve a problem that your user has. And it becomes a very clear almost binary black and white perspective.
You know, where are we able to relieve the pain for the user create gains for the user super clear it's sort of did we, or didn't we. You can argue a little bit in the middle there, but does the product, does the service get the job done? And here's the key thing I want to come back to. Rapid prototyping enables you to get really good feedback, really high quality, because you're not guessing.
You're not saying to people, Hey, I want you to imagine that you're using [
00:03:00] a particular product or service. You go right to the moment. Say here's a product, here's a task. I want you to complete and see if they can get it. It's quick and it's easy. It's super straight forward. Now the, the art to rapid prototyping is making it feel like it's kind of close to a finished product, but it's actually not to put it in software terms.
How can you get good software feedback without writing code? That's like a really good way to think about it because as soon as you have to write code for it, As soon as you think about an analog product, as soon as you have to actually get the materials, get all the engineering, the bill of materials together.
Like once you have to get it all together, it starts to become slow, a lot of effort, time, money, resources. So here's the thing you only want to deploy time and resources into a software or an analog product. If you know, it's worth building. [
00:04:00] And how do you know if it's in the earlier days? Like you're only guessing, right.
So how do we get out of this guessing how do we get into knowing? And that is by creating an experience that feels like it's sort of a model, a prototype an example of a product and how it might work. And what you want to do is you want to test it super early on and actually. If you're bold enough, you should test all the time with your users because that means you'll be learning.
And the more you learn, the more you understand your users, it's like, it's like magnetism. You just can't help, but going towards the right path. And too often, people sit there and guess a product deploy all these resources only to work out. It kind of sucks. Nobody likes it. Well, you don't have to do it like that.
You can just prototype your way to a great product. And sometimes in fact, [
00:05:00] all of the time you'll have to change your idea, but you're not changing because you feel like you're changing because you're learning something from your users. You're getting this feedback, you're getting this data, you're getting them to truly test something.
Complete a task and Hey, maybe they complete the task and you realize there's more tasks in the overall user journey. Great tests. Those maybe you realize you're trying to solve the wrong problem. Also. Good. I mean, think about it. If you realize your product is not right, which is guaranteed by the way, it's going to happen.
Wouldn't you rather work it out when it's just a lightweight prototype. Rather than like the full finished thing. I mean, think about the pain suffering of a year or two years of work to build a project only to realize, well, ain't nobody liking that we don't want to be there so we can use rapid prototyping to create these light models.
[
00:06:00] And here's the critical thing. You must test it with users. Don't go guessing don't go guessing. Don't assume people will want it. You need to know that they want. Okay. Now, before we get to this five step plan, then I'm going to give you for rapid prototyping. I want to set the scene. I want you to imagine you've said yes to rapid prototyping and yes.
To doing it with your real users. Okay. Not just family and friends, but come on, let's get the real users, people who might pay for this product. Okay. So you've got them, you've got the users in a room. You got a cool bunch of smart people who want to build something. Really good. We're in a good place right now.
So what do we need to do? I'm going to take you through each of these five steps, and now if you're interested in them, you can head over to bottom-up dot IO, where we have a full master class on rapid prototyping. We will even have this very five-step plan in that masterclass. It's all yours. You can [
00:07:00] download it, use it, go for it.
So what I want you to imagine right now is you're in the room and you're like, okay. Wow. What happens now, we're a bunch of makers and creators, and we're a bunch of customers. What are we going to do? Well, you sit your customers over to the side. And as a group, you need to start by understanding what. Is the real pains that your customers experience when trying to get a particular job done that job might be to study effectively.
It could be to save money while shopping. These are all jobs that people are trying to get done and they experienced pains and gains along the way. And new products and services offered. Relieve pains and create new gains. And so what you need to find out is, Hey customer, what's on your mind. What are the pains that you're experiencing with a [
00:08:00] particular job that you're trying to get done?
Now what's essential here is to make sure. That you actually go to your customer to understand their pains. You do not guess them now in a perfect world. If you're doing a rapid prototyping session, you may have done some pre-research before that day in order to understand the customer. However, that's cool.
If you haven't done that, you can even prototype this a moment to get to know the customer's pains and gains. So this is step one of the plan. This is understanding and. What I want you to do is free yourself of all your bias and just be very open-minded about what you might hear from your customers. In fact, I would also add to that be a little bit curious, like really, I really want you to kind of Be like Sherlock Holmes, you know, try and work out.
What's bothering them. So how do you do that? Okay. So this part, [
00:09:00] one of understanding is you can do things like mystery shopping or what we call fly on the wall. You could just interview. Or go next level. Why don't you role play a scenario that they encounter? Maybe it's like let's say trying to optimize the service experience at an automotive dealer.
Okay. Well, imagine that you're bringing your car in for the service. I'm the agent and you're the customer. Let's go. You can do card sorting activities you can do is fun. Exercise called heaven and hell what's heaven. These are all ways for you to go, huh? The customer, Hey, we've actually engaged our customer to understand their problems and what their pains are.
That's all you're trying to do. You don't have to get the answer to the problem yet. Okay. So what you might then do is go to this next. So you've done your understanding. Now you can go to your Ida. [
00:10:00] You can ask yourself, okay. What's quite clear. They have this massive problem. When they go to the car dealer that once they put the car in, I'm just coming up with an example here.
They have three hours of dead time. What do they do? Yeah, it's not like the shop. No, it takes me two going together. I don't have my car. So like, there's a really big problem. They have, they have this dead time when they've put their car in for a service. Okay. Well, what if we could make it instant instead of three hours?
Or you might say something like, how might we make those three hours? Great. What would we, what needs to be true for that to be a delight, something that they look forward to. Okay. So I'm now just using this car dealership exercise, just as a simple way to show you how you might ideate. So you break out in, into group, do some ideation.
Now you get to stage three. So you've done understanding and ideation. You need to decide which of these scenarios you're actually going to prototype [
00:11:00] and you might look for, and this is where you're getting a little bit more critical. You're getting a little bit more practical now and you're saying, okay, what might be the quickest to make, or what might be the most impactful for you?
Okay. Now there's lots of suggestions in, in our chart that you can get at bottom-up dot IO. Just go to the rapid prototyping masterclass. I'm just giving you some of my fives. Okay. So we're kind of three steps in here. We've understood the customer. We know their pains. We've ideated how we might relieve them.
Now we've had, we've got like a whole bunch of ideas up on the board. Okay. We've got to pick. Be critical. Be practical. Okay. Then you need to build it. You might build, this is step four. You might build a poster storyboard, a user journey map. You might bring up some content, maybe one or two little features.
If it's the first time it's probably in paper. You certainly don't want to be writing any code. And what you need to think of. Okay. What's the task. And what is the experience that we're going to build and you need to match them all up. [
00:12:00] So you gotta be productive. You need to often have create some really clear roles here like who's doing, because the key thing here is you want to do this as quick as possible.
So you can test hundreds of times because actually this is like the 10,000 hour rule. You just got to test a lot and you'll start to see all the patterns. Okay, so step four is building. Okay. So you've built a prototype of transforming the car dealership. So this experience you're super excited. What do you do now?
Step five, you test it and you go to the customer and you create a scenario. Hey, it's 10 o'clock Saturday morning. You're at your local Ford dealer. You're bringing your car in for a service. Okay. What we want to do is we want you to really enjoy the next. Period is three hours of the service experience.
And we're going to create a, your goal is to pick an experience that you'd like to do for three hours. So you give them a clear set of context and a scenario and a task, and [
00:13:00] you test it. I mean, I've tested crazy things, algorithms the finish line of a marathon, race banking experiences, and everything in between.
So you can really, you really can't. Everything. And once you've done it a lot, you can even say to users, Hey, well, you enjoyed this experience. The next customer that comes in, rather than me, the prototype, I explain it to you. You're a customer. I want you to advocate to this customer that's coming. I want you to advocate to them the experience, and I'm going to learn how you perceive the experience, super powerful stuff.
So then you have a five steps for rapid prototyping. You understand? Then you ideate and you've got to decide which idea you're going to try and solve. You, build it. Step four and step five, you test it with real users, get their feedback, set the scenario, set the task and watch it play out, listen and learn from your customers.
It's all about empathy, which is a cornerstone of prototype. And design thinking and those all come together to kind of be this system that we've created [
00:14:00] called bottom up innovation. And you can use it too. So if you're interested in bottom up innovation, if you're interested in rapid prototyping, head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can do the masterclass on rapid prototyping, where you can unlock the power of your creative.
All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap.