Creating a Tangible Visual
By: Nia Braccidiferro
Many people assume that since they finished the Ideation phase of the Design Thinking Process, that they’re done improving their idea altogether. This is extremely false. The next step in their journey is the Prototyping phase, which includes creating simple sketches to elaborate storyboards.
In a recent Interaction Design Foundation article, entitled, “Design Thinking: Get Started with Prototyping”, Rikke Dam and Teo Siang explain that prototypes can take many forms. You can even express your ideas through rough paper prototypes of digital interfaces, and even role-playing to act out a service offering an idea.
There is no limit to what you use to visualize your ideas, you just need to make a tangible/physical form of your idea. In fact, prototypes do not need to be full products; you can easily prototype a part of a solution. Dam and Siang reiterate that some prototypes can be quick and rough. These specific types of prototypes are used for the early stages of testing.
Others can be fully formed and detailed, since they are used for testing or pilot trials near the end of the project. This particular phase of the Design Thinking process is about bringing concepts to life and exploring their impact on the world before fully executing them.
Although this is well known, some companies still decide to validate their ideas without any prior research or questioning and attempt to create a final product before having the knowledge of its effect on the focus group or the world in general.
The authors of the article also state that a common misconception is that the research conducted in the early stages of the Design Thinking process will tell you everything that is needed to make the best solution.
Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Even if you searched through every database and discussed your idea with the majority of your target demographic, you would still need to test your creation for guaranteed success. When testing your product idea, you have the ability to discover assumptions, biases, and insights from your users that you were previously unaware.
These findings can be used to explore the parts of your idea that are problematic, so later they can be innovated or improved upon. In a similar article also written by Rikke Dam and Teo Siang for the Interaction Design Foundation, titled, “Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype”, they discuss the Design Thinking process further and claim that it’s a non-linear process.
The five stages that make up this process are not always sequential; they aren’t required to follow their predetermined order and they can even occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively. This happens due to the fact that once you’re done with prototyping and testing, you may realize that you need to go back to the drawing board. Nothing is perfect, especially on the first try.
When you receive feedback from different minds, you notice your mistakes and act upon them to make your product the best it can be. Without this phase, we don’t have the opportunity to stumble and trip. We would go along until the end thinking that our ideas were flawless without any changes. This is never the case. No matter how many great minds collaborate on a single idea, you will still need to reevaluate and rethink it all in the end.