Hello, and welcome to the bottom of skills podcast I might pass since I'm their CEO of quality science. And we, again, I get mega practical in the world of rapid prototyping today. I'm going to take you through the step by step guide for when you're in. The moment where you're testing with users. And I can tell you, when you put a prototype in front of a user, it sounds very straightforward, but understanding, uh, as fellow humans is not necessarily the easiest thing, it can be tricky.

And, um, when the feedback from a user is a bit mixed, Uh, and you're really in those early stages, trying to work out what's going on. What I have found is that this five step guide is essential. [00:01:00] And particularly, uh, if you've got some newbies, um, who it might not be so comfortable, uh, hearing directly back from.

Users and customers, this will be a really, really essential for you, for your colleagues. And frankly, it just helps keep you on track. Getting to this famous step-by-step guide for rapid prototyping. But to set this up, I really want to present you with the moment. It's the moment of truth. And this, I want you to imagine you're with a small group of your colleagues, you're all working on creating a new product, and you're pretty excited.

You've recruited in end users who are the target audience, and you've presented them with a prototype. And you've asked them to complete a task. Um, you know, let's say I, I love using the, uh, mortgage calculator example. Let's say you've asked them to work out how much they can get as a mortgage loan.

What's [00:02:00] the loan amount. And you've got an online mortgage calculator where they can work that out. You've given them the task, you've set the context, they try to use it and then it doesn't work. Now it could be, they're giving you a voiceover as they click through the journey, or maybe it's their body language, or maybe at the end, you ask them after they've attempted to complete the task and the feedback could be mixed bad or just otherwise.

And you're like, Now I spoke about in the last episode, we just need to be open to this. Sometimes I see people that are just not used to receiving such direct feedback and, you know, let's be honest. When it's not great, it's a little, a little uncomfortable, but I'm going to give you this five step guide when you're rapid prototyping that will really serve as, um, sort of a set [00:03:00] of railway tracks for you just to travel along, hit your stations and get to central.

So the first thing I want to talk about is that, um, You've kind of got these five stages. I want to introduce those and then tell you how you navigate them. This is all to be used when you're in the moment you are creating the prototype to test with the user. It could be that the users are coming in in 10 minutes.

Maybe you're in the middle of testing. Maybe you've got one last test for the day. This five step guide will help you. Okay. So this first step in this is to understand it's all about unstained, where you are. Are we trying to understand that's the first step? Are we trying to ideate? Decide, build or test?

Okay. Understand ideate, decide, build, or test. These are the five steps. Now the reason these are so important is that often. People who are [00:04:00] building, creating rapid prototyping, uh, environments, creating prototypes, often misinterpret where they are in the process. So they might think they've really got this thing.

Um, but actually it's built on a really fundamental, poor understanding of the user. And that will just cause no end of havoc for you guys. So. Number one. Um, you need to make sure you can imagine. I want you to imagine you're ticking these off as I go through. Do we understand the user? And this is all about being open, being curious, and you really want to use some of the methods that I've talked about could be card sorting, role-playing, even user interviews.

You can really start to use those in your prototyping just to confirm. Your understanding of the user and their needs particular here, what do you want to understand? What are the pains that they experienced when they do the task and what are the gains that they're looking for? Okay. [00:05:00] So that's the understand once you understand where they are, you can then ideate and to ideate, you can ask questions, like what if we created the world's best online mortgage care calculator?

What is the loan amount that you got in that calculator was valid for 48 hours? Without having to go to the branch or you might ask how might, how might we or other ones are great, which are like, what needs to be to be true, uh, to create something. Um, fantastic. So this is, uh, where you really start to shift away from sort of the curiosity of the understanding phase.

Now you're getting creative. Yeah. Energetic in the ideation and everyone should play a role there. So, if you can take understanding of the user tick, we've got lots of ideas, the next thing, and this is really important. Very often. It's overlooked. You need to decide what we're going to build. Now, if your team's doing well, you can have a lot of ideas on the board.

So the question then is. What are we [00:06:00] going to build? So that's why we break out the deciding step as its own step. And you really need to have some critical thinking about, well, what are what's our evaluation criteria? And, um, I love to, uh, questions that could sort of help you create a kind of. Top 10 list.

What's the quickest to make. Um, so that's being super practical. Like what can we just pump out, make it happen? Um, and then the other question you could ask of all of the ideas on the wall, you could say, which ones can have the most impact for the user. Yeah, two very different ways in to reorganizing all of those ideas.

So you can decide what you want to make. Now it could be for the first part of the day, you work on the quick ones. And then the second half of the day, you go for the real big, impactful ones. When you're a bit warmed up or vice versa, that choice is really yours and deciding and discussing as a team is essential.

So [00:07:00] we understand the user, Ida did a ton of ideas. We've now decided which idea we're going to make. So now we need to build now the building is, um, really important because you need to bring the idea sufficiently to life in order to create the direction experience. And so what you want, I really want to do is have a bit of a list.

Um, you might have storyboards use journey maps, content. You might have some digital stuff, might have paper stuff. Uh, everything's up for creativity at this point, but actually more importantly here, it's all about assigning tasks within the group and getting people really productive because sometimes you might have a real doer in the group who wants to build everything, but, um, My experience has been that very rarely works because it's like everything's on one person.

And then the, the scale of the work is too high. They can't produce the prototype, the screens, the clicks, [00:08:00] the pieces of paper quick enough. And so the user testing sort of loses a lot of momentum, but. Decide what you want to build. And in what we just talked about then was that all right, make it clear a choice for what the form of the building is going to be and give out tasks within the group.

Everyone can play a role, um, so that you know what you're going to build. Lastly the testing stage. So, um, the most important thing you're sitting there, you've got your prototype. If you're really good about the first four steps, you've got your prototype. What do you need to do? You need to create a scenario?

Where is the user going to be...