Rapid Prototyping is a powerful tool to test and validate an idea. It's the best way to learn if your product solves a user problem.

Many famous inventors have used rapid prototyping to help them create game-changing products: James Dyson, Wright Brothers, and Thomas Eddison.

We've just launched our 'How-to' video in rapid prototyping.

There are two books that we recommend for further reading on prototyping:

Inspired by Marty Cagan (Buy on Amazon)
Prototyping for Designers by Kathryn McElroy (Buy on Amazon)

We have done podcasts on each of the books too:

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mike Parsons: Hello, and welcome to moonshots. We are back again with our how-to series. And today it's all about rapid prototyping. And I can tell you when I discovered rapid prototyping, my mind was like blown and it answered a lot of questions. It's like the Supercheap for building new products. And today we're going to dig in and give you everything you need to know in rapid progress.

[00:00:26] We're going to give you a quick breakdown of the history. We're going to define rapid prototyping. We're going to give you a little bit of a checklist that you can use when you're prototyping to make sure you get it right. And then we're going to give you some habits around how to ideate, how to be curious, how to test, how to learn and in the end, how to get great results when you're testing with users because, in the end, they can give you the ultimate insight.

[00:00:51] They can tell you if this is a. That they need, they want they desire. Is this solving a problem for them? And that's why it's so good to rapid [00:01:00] prototype because you can work that out before you build your final product. If you rapid prototype, you'll be on your way. Let's get into it. The rapid prototyping playbook, that's it.

[00:01:10] How to test your product idea before you build it. And that really is the key with rapid prototype. We can avoid making this enormous, costly, timely mistake of building something that nobody wants. Famously Eric Reese, the author of lean startup talked about spending many years and millions of dollars building a product that nobody wanted.

[00:01:34] Rapid prototyping is very much part of lean startup and design thinking, and it's very much part of helping you work out what people really. And not having to actually build the entire thing in order to work that out. So let's get in there. So I really want to get you thinking. I want you to think about how many prototypes lay behind the success of things [00:02:00] that have really changed the world and check this out.

[00:02:01] You might be very familiar today with James Dyson or so James Dyson and his brand Dyson that have vacuum cleaners. Hand dryers, you name it. If there is air moving, they have mastered it. And when he originally started on his adventure to recreate the vacuum cleaner, he built 5,127 prototypes in his back shed over the course of 15 years.

[00:02:31] And actually here on screen, you actually can see one of those. But he built these continuously until we ended up with the final product that we all know and love today. My point here is it takes a lot of work to prototype to get things right. But the more you work on it, the more you prototype, the bigger your success chances become.

[00:02:54] Think about it 15 years, 5,000 plus prototypes. And now he has a multi-billion dollar brand. [00:03:00] Let's go back further in time and let's look at the Wright brothers, the pioneers of flight. I've just picked out a number they're famous for having spent years and years modeling their prototypes, but they spent and invested the time to build over 200 programs.

[00:03:20] For the wind shapes alone is non talking about the engine, just the wing shapes that would have the right balance, given the right acceleration velocity, you name it over 200 prototypes of the wings alone. And what's really cool about this. As you can see that you may have heard about prototyping with tools like Adobe XD, envision and Figma.

[00:03:43] And using those for modern applications, but here's the crazy thing. Prototyping has been around for ages and it's at the heart of some of the biggest technology revolutions that we have known. And so let's bring it home. Let's talk about the light bulb, Thomas [00:04:00] Edison famous for saying that it took over 10,000 prototypes to get the light bulb, but think about how that's changed the world. There's a quote here that I really want to read to you that encapsulates his thinking about prototyping. And it gives very powerful in terms of how to think about testing and learning. When you're building your product. Here we go. This is what Edison said. I have not failed a hundred times.

[00:04:24] I have not failed once I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. And here, this is the. That worst case scenario, if your prototype FAS, at least, you know what not to do next. And the most talented people say, okay, what did I learn? And what am I going to do next? And that opportunity is in front of you right now to learn how to prototype.

[00:04:52] So it's all going to be about prototyping and prototyping. Is this huge theme that we've discovered doing [00:05:00] the moonshots podcasts. We've seen not only the likes of Jonathan I've Steve jobs Eric Reese of more recent times, but what I propose to you is it, so James Dyson, it's the Wright brothers.

[00:05:12] It's Thomas Edison. You can even go right back into the history. Leonardo DaVinci use prototypes as well. This is what happens with dementia. It's motor. We look for the patterns of success. In people that have done amazingly bold and ambitious things. And if you go to model.moonshots.io, you can see all of the models and rapid prototyping is one of our favorites.

[00:05:35] Okay. So there's actually three types of prototypes diagnostic interaction. And the third one is a journey based one. I'm going to break each of these down. I'm going to give you the chance to understand how each of these can help. So the first one had diagnostic one super early stage in your new product idea, you might conduct an interview and let's take a, getting a mortgage.

[00:05:58] As an example, you [00:06:00] might say to them, to your user. And this is the key bit, say it to your user, ask it of your user prototype with your users. Don't prototype in abstract. Dome prototype in an ivory tower, miles and miles away from your customer. That's what segway did. And they were a big failure because of it, despite all of their engineering prowess, they didn't test with users, but you can't.

[00:06:24] So early stage diagnostic prototype would be asking people to walk you through the steps of the most stressful part of a mortgage. I'm going to focus on financial services and mortgages so that you can understand some examples that we might. You might say, ah, you've got a problem with your mortgage application and you have to call the call center, this more of a role play than an interview.

[00:06:47] Another favorite of mine. And I just recently did a lot of these, which is card sorting. And this is where you can ask people to prioritize and you can prototype what is the best and worst part of an [00:07:00] experience. And this can yield lots of very early stage what we call diagnostic insight. This is how you can prototype things, get people into the direct experience, interacting and talking about the, sort of the pains in the gains they have with a potential new product or service.

[00:07:14] That's number one, when we talk about the types of prototyping, number two, an interactive prototype, this is where we start going for a moment or an interaction. We're not going to go for the whole product journey yet. We're just going to go for an interaction. So it might be just a transit. Let's say, for example, you want to receive something from your bank.

[00:07:34] Maybe you want to transfer something to another customer and a big, maybe even you have five posters announcing a new banking app, test them with different propositions, different pains, and gains. See which one works, or maybe what you could do is try some different ways of role-playing out customer support or interfaces for customer.

[00:07:57] Okay, so that's diagnostic then there's [00:08:00] interaction. Those are the two first parts of prototyping. The third part is the journey. Now the journey, this is where you go. For example, if you were to take a banking app, do the whole onboarding of a new customer a loan application feature, or you might pull everything together, onboarding getting a loan, checking your balance up, sell cross, sell of.

[00:08:22] That would be a journey based prototype. So these are the three wildly different types of prototypes done at different stage of searching for product fit. But hopefully what you can see here is that your hands, you can do a diagnostic prototype, just a prototype around an interaction or a moment, or you might go after an entire journey.

[00:08:42] What's really interesting is you can take three different shapes, forms, tools, and media to each of these for a diagnostic one. You might just use stickies on a wall. When you want to create a moment or an interaction, you could sketch it, maybe on paper, maybe even just put it on [00:09:00] a whiteboard. You don't have to build a digital prototype.

[00:09:03] And of course, once you get into more of a journey based prototype, you can use digitally. Interesting thing is if you stay up the left-hand side here, you can be super quick. You can prototype a lot. And the reason that you want to prototype a lot is you learn more. So I would always start from the left and move my way across to the right.

[00:09:21] So there you have it. Three types of prototype. So let's summarize a bit of here. Prototyping is a powerful tool to test and validate an idea. It could be for a product or a service. It could be digital or. And it's the best way to learn of this idea of does your product actually solve a problem that your user has.

[00:09:44] And as I said earlier, only of your testing should be with users. So now we're going to give you a chance to evaluate where you're at and are you doing rapid prototyping? And it could be a lot to learn for you. Maybe it's the whole piece. Maybe they're just [00:10:00] certain things that you've been struggling with rapid prototyping.

[00:10:04] Okay. So what is this formula for the basic things we need to check to evaluate if we're doing prototyping correctly, first pay the first thing that is really important as you should be testing with users, secondary thing is you need to be giving them a task. And so you need to ask yourself, have I set a task for, to use it?

[00:10:24] So you want to find out how much you can borrow from an online from a mortgage. I want you to find out. So here's an example of one. I want you to find out how much he could borrow on a mortgage via an online calculator. So now that's really interesting because you're asking them a very specific question, tell me the number.

[00:10:43] So you've given them that task and you see why this is really helpful. Then you give them the context. It's the where, who, why, what, where, all of those are the doubles. So you might have to tell him it's 9:00 AM. You only have 30 minutes. You're on your home. You're at home and you're on your phone.

[00:10:59] Okay. Really [00:11:00] important. And so hopefully then your prototype matches to that. Have you tested the use case before testing with users? So you should do a few run-throughs. Do we have the materials to make changes in real time? Because the whole point of doing this is you learn. If you learn, you're going to change and improve your product.

[00:11:15] So can you actually make an update after one round of testing? And here's a really simple. Yeah, man, this one always comes up. Have you actually confirmed that the users will attend the testing? It's important for you might not be as important for them. So make sure you confirm on the day that they're coming due, all of these things, give them a task, set the context, have a great prototype and you will create the direct experience.

[00:11:38] This means people will really give you quality feedback. Cause then they're going to imagine what it's like to use the app. They're going to be immersed in it. They're going to get feedback like it to finish it. So some of the things you can do there is ask them to do a voiceover, why they're going through it.

[00:11:52] Something, I find myself doing a bit of saying, Hey, perform the tasks like I'm not here. And, throughout this process measure their ability to complete the [00:12:00] task, this idea of task completion, or task success, or measuring success rate. Some people call it really huge if you want to have successful prototyping.

[00:12:11] So what's the science behind all of this. This is a really important point that I want to touch on is you don't need the full real product to give feedback. You can do it with a light prototype, a sketch, or a version of the prototype and the science behind this is based on some MRI scans that were done on the human brain when looking at images.

[00:12:35] And here's the story. Simple line drawings can capture the essence of a beach or a mountain just as well as a photograph would. And what I'm doing here on the right-hand side is I'm showing you as some of the test material that was used by a higher universal. In this complaint. I put the credit down here for the study so that you [00:13:00] can reference it and Google it if you want.

[00:13:02] But when it, even when they remove 75% of the pixels from the image, people were still able to determine better than chance what the subject matter was. So our brain doesn't need a hundred percent of the pixels, a hundred percent of the data to work out the image, and this translates directly into prototype.

[00:13:22] The user doesn't need a hundred percent finished product with a light prototype that can still generate visceral intuitive responses that will help, do you have a good product? Are you helping solve a problem? Is this worth building? Okay, so let's look at the habits and the things that you can do every single day to build a great prototype one.

[00:13:45] It's all about being curious. To be creative, be divergent, try different ways, three, be super critical about what you're going to test first for be really productive. Make sure you've got lots of materials and you're ready to go get ready to [00:14:00] build and then test away. Now let's break each of these down.

[00:14:05] The understanding piece is when you're working with users. So you need to be empathetic. Be curious to understand what's the real problem. What are the pains they experienced in gains they experience when they're trying to get a job? So you can do all sorts of activities, do that. You can be a fly on the wall, do those interviews.

[00:14:21] I'm plenty here for you to get you inspired. The second one is the ideation. Then once you have that first data from the understanding, ask questions, like what if, how might we, what needs to be true, really try and think of some different ways into building a product. So out of the five habits, the first I understand and ideate next one is to decide.

[00:14:43] Once you've got a bunch of ideas. You need to make something. You should have a bias towards action. So you should ask yourself, what's going to have the most impact. It's going to be quick to make find a way to get yourself into action. Don't be thinking and chatting for hours upon hours. Get into action, [00:15:00] build something.

[00:15:02] And when you build, you can build posters, storyboards, journey, maps, contents, single features, whole journey. Make sure that you've got all of those materials ready to go, and that you're ready to update those because over time as you test, this will change. Now that talks about testing. Now we talked about creating the scenario, making sure we create the direct experience using task space.

[00:15:24] A last one, when you're really learning from these tests is once you get a real comprehensive bunch of really good feedback to your product, into your test. You can ask a user, that's done the experience to actually present the product to a brand new tester. So what you get to see is user to user advocacy.

[00:15:46] This is very good to understand how people might share your products, the value they see in your. So there you have it. Five habits, understand ideate, decide, build, and test. You can do all of these, and you're going to have a great prototype, two books that [00:16:00] I really recommend. If you want to go deeper on this, the first of which is inspired by Marty Cagan huge product guru covers a lot more than just prototyping.

[00:16:09] But he talks about how to create tech products that customers love. So check that out, inspired by Marty. Yeah, the book that I want to point out to you is prototyping for designs by Mackelroy. This one's a bit more specific to digital and physical products and they're prototyping again, this one's a bit more niche, but if you're really getting into prototype.

[00:16:31] That will help you along the way. So there you have it. We have done this study of rapid prototyping. Now it's your turn to have a go to dig into, explore, to test and learn and to try. And if you're really fascinated by this idea of rapid prototyping or the fact that it's part of over 60 things that successful people do and head to moonshot.io, where you can discover the moonshots model, where you can discover what it takes to be the best version of yourself.[00:17:00]

[00:17:00] Okay.