I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the world’s most innovative technology companies. The products these companies churn out at breakneck speeds have changed our world. It’s no wonder that when they’re tasked with solving a new problem, creating a new feature, or building a new product, the natural inclination is to sit down at a computer and start dealing with 0’s and 1’s right out of the gate. But jumping straight to creation without gaining user empathy, ideating, and exploring rapid experimentation can be a foolhardy—and wasteful—endeavor.
At Tangible, we’ve created an intensive workshop where the end goal is to actually put people in the user environment and develop a low-fidelity prototype to generate fast learnings that can then be reproduced at scale. Some geniuses can come up with the next billion-dollar app on their own. But for the rest of us, getting inspired by real-world situations leads to the best solutions–and those solutions don’t necessarily have to be technology-based.
Case in point: we gave one of our classes the challenge of finding a way to make lunchtime more productive and creative for employees with limited time for rapid experimentation. The idea was to make better human connections over lunch and help build new relationships. One team quickly focused on creating an app that would help employees connect to colleagues outside their immediate groups over lunch. As they talked in circles over requirements and how to build this app, I interrupted. I asked them to go on a little field trip with me and walk over to the company cafe. Once we got there I said, “This is the cafe where people are going to make connections based on your idea. Why don’t you stay here for a while and think about what you’re going to build for your users.”
There is nothing like getting out into the field and hanging with prospective customers. I stood back and listened as the team began to simplify the idea in this new context. As the team paused to look through the eyes of the patrons of the cafe, they began to reduce the complexity of their idea. In fact, the simpler it became, the better.
I went to check on other teams. When I returned to the cafe 45 minutes later, the app had been scrapped and the team was prototyping a tangible device with chopsticks, forks, tape, and napkins. While I can’t give away the details of the final solution (it’s protected IP now!), I discovered that the execution had been simplified into something they could rapidly test and get feedback on within an hour. And in the end, they built the simplest tool to help foster connections during lunchtime in their cafeteria. The next day, they tested it with 14 or 15 users and got the data to give them the direction they needed–something they never would have gotten if they had just been handed a creative brief and told what to build.
The moral of the story is two-fold: you need to get out of the office to experience the world in which your customer lives and you’ll achieve better solutions when you build to learn in a short amount of time. If you are building a loyalty program for an airline, go to the airport as a team and design in the waiting spaces. If you are building a marketing campaign for a car loan program, go sit in a car dealership. I am sure they won’t mind. Once you do that, building to learn can deliver better—often simpler—solutions quickly.
When people argue that they don’t have time for rapid experimentation because they just need to get a project out the door, I always say that they don’t have time not to do it. Yeah, you can build an app, but if some toothpicks and a stick of glue get crucial customer feedback quickly, it’s time to consider rapid prototyping.