Before You Build: How Asking the Right Questions Can Save Your Time, Money, and Energy
Would you carry a wooden palm with you in all your meetings and pretend it is a PDA?
There are many ways of validating ideas: with test cards , pretotypes (yes, it’s not a typo, that’s what they are called) or prototypes, or any other names and methods that exist in the world.
In this post, I want to bring your attention to the main idea behind experimenting in general and give you a few examples of what I found in my little research about it.
Funny story😀: on a Saturday morning, I was checking the Strategyzer book “ Testing Business Ideas” for the test cards and found there the “Wooden Palm Pilot” info which placed me in the research mode, and what I am going to share here is based on this.
Situation:
Your team has ideas, solutions, concepts, and initiatives that they want to validate before implementing - how to do this having a high impact and the least effort?
If you want to know more about why experimenting works with all personality types, check out this article.
Which are a few experimenting examples?
🎲 Pretotype: create a non-operational version of your product and ask your potential market to use their imagination to pretend that it actually works to see if and/or how they would use it.
Example: Palm Pilot Wooden Model of Jeff Hawkins - in 1995, Jeff Hawkins wanted to gauge the desirability of a product. He tested the PalmPilot’s design with this model, using a chopstick for a stylus. He took pretend notes in meetings and counted the steps it took to perform common tasks. He carried the device in the pocket 95% of the time and “scheduled appointments” with it 55% of the time. He wanted to have an answer to the questions:
“Would I carry something like this from the form factor?”
“Would I use it and for what?”
“When, how will I use it?”
“Should we build it?”
Image from Computer History Museum page
🎲 Prototype: you typically answer the question “Can we build it?”, but not only.
The origins of prototyping can be traced back to the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries when manufacturers began using models and mock-ups to test and refine their designs before mass-producing them. In software development, the practice of prototyping has been around since the 1960s.
Example: Operational Risk - finance use case on a design sprint I have facilitated - test a new part of an assessment process by creating a fake software prototype that looks real and works with mockups. Why? To test it with real users and get their feedback before implementing the real software. The question we wanted to answer was: “How intuitive are the steps of this part of the risk assessment for an Operational Risk user?”. Saving time, energy, and money by getting user feedback upfront implementation - Design Sprint method used as described in the book “Sprint”.
Image as PrintScreen from the above software prototype
Example: Savioke prototype for a robot which was toothbrushes, snacks, etc to guest rooms in hotels. The question that they wanted to answer was: “How the hotel guests will react to a robot with personality?” You can check more use cases on Design Sprints in the resources below.
Image from Savioke real product, check the website in resources for the story
One-phrase summary:
I think the most important is to know “To which question do I want to get answers?”. Depending on the answer, if I build a prototype or a prototype or any other “thing” that answers my question, relevant is that it saves time, money, and energy before the real product is built.
Resources: