Thursday
Yesterday you brainstormed solutions to your ideation prompts. It is possible that stepping away from your work provided more insight. Before starting today’s task, please take out your notebook and set a timer for 15 minutes to envision solutions – a final brainstorming session.
How to choose an idea to prototype
If you just completed the brainstorm, take a short break and move to a new space. We want to separate generating ideas from evaluating them. So, how do you evaluate which idea is best? It all comes back to goals and that's why we call our approach goal-directed design.
Which idea best addresses your persona's goals? That's your guide. If you have multiple ideas that could meet your persona's goals then you can, and we usually do, also consider which ideas best address business goals, how much investment they require, their feasibility, and other things as secondary criteria. But we always make sure to use user goals to drive our decision. That's why research and personas are so useful –they help us stay connected to those goals in our decision-making process. Remember, if your solution really helps people reach their goals, your solution is more likely to be successful and draw a loyal fan base.
Exercise: assess and choose an idea
Look at the list of ideas you brainstormed. Using your proto-persona and their goals, evaluate your ideas, choose one to move forward with. Don’t worry about whether it’s technologically feasible or seems too crazy— the prototyping you do in the next section will help you figure that out. Choose the idea that excites you the most and has the best likelihood of meeting your proto-persona’s goals.
Create a prototype
How do you create a prototype? Well, there are a lot of ways to tackle it, so let's look at some examples. You could write a scenario, which is a narrative story that helps you experiment with the ideal experience from your user's perspective.
We suggest that you create a storyboard, which is a visual story describing the user experience over time. Storyboards are a great prototyping tool because visual stories are really easy for people to relate to. It's not hard for people to imagine the experience as you walk them through a storyboard and then tell you what would or would not work for them and that makes storyboards really great for testing. The other thing that's nice about storyboards is they help you keep your persona's needs at the center of your ideas. You're going to make the persona the main character of the story rather than giving the product center stage. To use a storyboard for testing you'll put your storyboard in front of real people to get their feedback and you'll ask follow-up questions to get a deeper understanding of what and how they're thinking about your concept.
How to make a storyboard
There are lots of different ways to go about creating a storyboard. First of all, some people they like to start with sketching and some people like to start with a story outline. Other people just start writing the story linearly and then they illustrate it. It's totally up to you. You should do what comes most naturally to you.
One idea is to come up with a list of challenges, things that you know would be important to solve in order to make it a great experience. So in our design challenge for Skypad Air, that might be knowing what gate to go to and whether the flight is on time, getting a boarding pass and seat assignment, knowing and paying any fees for checked baggage, or estimating the time to get through security. And then, you can come up with a quick list of key actors and environmental factors that should be weaved into the story, that is, people and context that need to be considered because they impact the experience. So in our check-in challenge, the actors might be the traveler or a group of travelers, an airline representative, or maybe a security person. For environmental factors, we might consider transportation to the airport, the layout of the airport itself, weather, or even the noise level of the airport. And of course, we have our idea that we chose to prototype in the envision phase. You can even include a few ideas in the storyboard if they work well together. And then, we can write the story.
Write a story
Good stories have three key components:
- an original life condition - the setting, situation, or problem; a transformation, which is a series of events that explains how your persona overcomes challenges and uses your new product or service to achieve their goals; and last but not least, an improved future, where your product ultimately made their life better in some way. So, let's say that our idea is a context-aware local navigation aid like Google Maps for airports, and that it'll help our persona navigate their way from the curb to the gate, providing directions and tips all along the way. So, we’d sketch out her original life condition – being confused about where to go next in the airport and feeling anxious about getting to the gate on time. And then, I'd outline the transformation with her airport navigation app – this is that idea that we wanted to prototype. And then, we draw her improved future – a more relaxed, confident traveler. So, after sketching the story roughly out, we might go back and forth tweaking the narrative and the drawings as the idea becomes more concrete. And for each step we must think about three things for our user: what they see, think, and do.
- a guidepost - what information or guidepost does my persona need to see to make sure that they feel informed and confident? What do they need to see in their environment that impacts the experience? What is my persona thinking and what do I want them to think or feel? As designers we want to make sure that we've given our users the information that they need to make a decision. So have we given them that information and have we prompted them to think about it?
- a persona action - what is my persona doing and what do I want my persona to do as a result? Is there a specific action that I really need them to take? If so, make sure you've given them a clear indicator of how to take that action.