It’s all well and good to have an idea, but the real learning happens when users interact with something they can interact with. Prototyping is a great way to, “fail fast” or as we like to phrase it, “learn fast” by allowing our users to get their hands on a rough version of our solution. You can take this a step further by involving your users in the build of the prototype!
Design Phase: Impact
Facilitator: 1
Activity Group: 8-12
Time: 60 Min
Materials: Whiteboard space, Metric Development Worksheet
Before the Activity
Determine what kind of prototype you’ll be asking the team to build and gather the appropriate materials. Some prototypes are as simple as a Word doc, others can be more elaborate with crafting materials used to build a physical representation of an idea. Remember, you’re not looking to build something pretty and polished, just something to get the idea across to your users.
Determine how many working groups you’ll divide participants into. Don’t create working groups larger than 5 to ensure everyone has a chance to contribute.
Prepare the session’s workspace to accommodate the multiple working groups and make sure everyone has enough supplies.
Preparing Materials
For the exercise, you will need the set of goals and actions for which you are hoping to develop a monitoring system available for each participant to view and arrange. If conducting the exercise virtually, consider a virtual whiteboarding tool with each goal and action pre-loaded. If in person, consider laying out each goal and action on their own sticky note or index card and displaying it on a wall or whiteboard. Depending upon the volume of goals and actions under consideration, consider preparing an additional document to distribute to each participant for reference.
The core of the activity involves answering a set of specific questions related to topics of information. If helpful, make use of the metric development worksheet and consider adapting it as a template for several spaces on your whiteboard or wall.
In addition to preparing content materials, consider preparing a metric development worksheet background to distribute to each participant.
Receiving Input in Advance
Depending upon the complexity of your team’s organizational context, it may be beneficial to begin to complete certain steps of the activity ahead of the session driven by input from the team. One key area you can consider for input is “Information Flows.” Consider preparing this section on your own if you have sufficient organizational context, otherwise consider sourcing this information from participants.
During the Activity
Divide the participants into working groups and share the idea that you’ll be prototyping in the session. Let everyone know that they will have 20 minutes to use the materials provided to create a rough first version of the solution. Set a timer and let them get to work!
After the 20 minutes is up, go around the room and ask each group to share out their prototype. As a group, discuss which prototype to move forward with or which features should be combined to put in front of users.
After the Activity
With a prototype created, it’s time to test it out. Schedule one-on-one sessions or focus groups with end users, explain the scenario that they would use this prototype in, and let them interact with it. Take notes on their feedback and your observations to improve the next version of the prototype.
Repeat this process until you’re satisfied that your idea has been thoroughly tested and is ready for launch.