Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I might pass since I'm the CEO of quality science, and this is our second installment of our rapid prototyping series. And in this episode, we're going to talk about all the different types of rapid prototyping. In fact, There has so many different flavors of this practice.

I mean, you can do it in all sorts of ways. High fidelity, low fatigue, Ellie, you can do it in situ you can do it in a studio. You can do everything from role play, you name it. There are so many different ways to apply it. I've been spending years doing this, um, and. It's wonderful. It's powerful. It gives you such clear feedback.

But what I find is a lot of people that I introduced to [00:01:00] rapid prototyping, um, find it a little bit hard to know where to start. And that's what I think this episode is really going to do is going to give you a hint, a tip. A nod or a suggestion towards, you know, the really what type of rapid prototyping should you kind of conduct.

And I'm going to explore that in all its different flavors. So let's get into it. The first thing I want to do is just make sure that we're all on the same page about, uh, what the prototype, uh, really is. And. The best way to explain it. It's like a model or a sketch or a light version of your product idea.

You don't need to completely create the product to prototype it. In fact, the whole idea between prototyping is that you're trying to avoid building any unnecessary elements in which. To conduct a [00:02:00] successful test. So you just want to create the lightest most essential version. It can be a bit rough. It can be a little raw.

It might not have a logo. It might not have all the fancy colors and, you know, wonderful stock imagery. It could just be very functional. They're utilitarian now. So that's what we mean by a prototype and what I want to give you as a, sort of a threshold by which you can judge D is your prototype good enough?

And it needs to create sufficient sensory stimulus. Uh, that suggests what the product might be. So people can give you. Real feedback. So let's break that down a little bit. Um, this sensory stimulus means you don't want people to do a classic focus group situation where everybody sits around the table and the facilitator tater says, how likely would you, um, what you want to do is if you want to test a [00:03:00] product, you want to try and recreate.

The real life situation you want to, you want to try and get real feedback. We are all familiar with products that come out into the world. And as soon as real people start to use them, we're all like, well saying, going to work and that's because they just haven't tested. I can certainly guarantee they haven't used rapid prototyping.

So you just need to create sufficient, um, sensory response. You can touch it, feel it, see it. Um, and it gives me a good sense of the product and it could be put into a situation where you said, okay, we'd love you to research your next vacation and find the perfect destination. Um, Give them enough in order to do something like that.

Or if it's like a banking product, make a cash withdrawal or transfer, there's a classic use cases and you can build some prototypes that do that. The key here with, with the different types is to understand. And the starting point is we're just creating a light version or a sketch. [00:04:00] Okay. Now on think of prototypes, generally being bucketed into three.

Particular types type number one, very early stage, and that's called the diagnostic prototype. The second type is the journey prototype. This is where you sort of paint a picture of an entire experience. And the third one is the experience prototype. And this one is where you are really bringing it to life.

And this might include some sort of clickable digital prototype. Okay. Diagnostic. Journey experience at three types. Now, the important thing is that you create different stimulus and you conduct different activities throughout these different types. Okay. So. What I'm going to do for you is, um, take you through some of the [00:05:00] ones that I really like, some of the activities and some of the stimulus, some of the prototypes that you would use for them.

So if you're doing diagnostic, uh, rapid prototyping, the key thing here is you're really early stage. You might have very, uh, early forming product ideas and you might actually. A prototype with real users, which is another key component of rapid prototyping. We don't just prototype and test it on ourselves.

We actually test it with real users and I've got a whole show about how to do that in the best way. Coming up later in this series. But the first thing you could do is role play. You could do interviews or one of my favorites is card sorting. Now, generally speaking, what you're trying to do in diagnostic prototyping is either to really define the problem [00:06:00] or to in a complex problem, such as personal finance, you're trying to.

For example, using card sorting, you would try and use some card sorting activities to work out. Which thing in this big complex universe of personal finance is your biggest pain or your biggest game. And in the case of card sorting, which has a bit of a personal favorite of mine, you actually ask someone to write down the top 10 things that frustrate them that are the blockers when they're doing their personal finances.

And then you can do a series of activities as, as a prototyping activity where you ask them to sort the cards in priority or biggest pain, or you can do some other ones that, which take the greatest effort, which costs you the most money, et cetera, et cetera. So you have all these different views now where you understand what really matters to users.

But what's interesting about this [00:07:00] as a prototyping exercise is you ask them to create. The stimulus and then you gave them activities sorting through different priorities or effectors in order for you to learn and validate actually what the problem they face is. And what you'll see is we go through this journey, we'll be moving more into what the solution looks like, but this diagnostic set of activities, interviews, role plays, and card sorting.

These are all ways for you to prototype and to confirm to yourself. To test and validate what really is the problem that we're solving. So now I want to move towards the journey and, um, what I want to do here is sometimes we want to call out just a moment in the journey, or we want to show someone the entire journey sometimes, um, you know, This type of a journey prototyping is you might show, uh, today personal finance journey, [00:08:00] and then you might ask them, uh, on that journey to nominate.

If they could solve one thing in that, and they could only solve one, what would it be? What you might do? It was a followup exercise is reorganizing journey and do a, what if and using this stimulus prototype of a user journey, and this can be on a whiteboard, right? You don't have to actually build all the products, just do it on the whiteboard and propose to them an alternate path and get their feedback.

Um, throughout the journey, you could pick a moment of transaction, uh, customer support and just using pen and paper or a whiteboard, bring it to life, ask them questions, ask them a task based completion questions to get their feedback. And the beauty here is that not only within the journey, but within the diagnostic testing.

You have not had to get out your laptop and code anything. You haven't had to illustrate an interface. This is all very low fidelity. And the important thing to [00:09:00] realize is the real reason you want to work pen and paper or person to person i...