IDEO is one of the largest and most important American design and consulting companies. Starting from the industrial design and interaction design (one of the founders was Bill Modgidge) IDEO has extended its consulting services and fell under strategic competence of consulting companies like McKinsey.

What differs IDEO from the others is approach based on using the same tools while designing products, such as user’s observation,analysis of use context, prototyping and iterative process for developing business strategy and marketing.
How design thinking can help building strategy?

Typical tools for strategists such as Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides don’t favor creativity and good communication (as we know, PowerPoint is an evil – seriously, it was responsible for the disaster of the space shuttle Columbia and its use has been banned by NASA.) You can’t properly rethink the whole project if it’s vision is contained in short passwords. PowerPoint slides are boring, and words can be understood differently. Strategy formulated and presented in this way, is trapped in ambiguous abstractions, difficult to clarify and evaluate.

According to IDEO, preparing strategic prototypes is much better solution. Prototype is not the right project, but it is only the presentation of vision engaging emotions and imagination (built to think). The human mind needs to confront some real object or a story to develop an idea and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Prototype can be a mockup of the product, it also can be a comic strip or film, which shows the use of the service in narrative form. An example of such prototype is concept presentation of future web browser Aurora, prepared by Adaptive Path, another company which integrates designing with strategic consulting.

In his article “Strategy by Design” the head of IDEO, Tim Brow, outlines the elements of creating a strategy. At the beginning: hit the Streets. This process of creating a strategy needs to be “human-centered”. To gather interesting insights it’s important to spend some time with consumers, watching their behaviors, personally test the products and services, get know the „user-experience” on which we can often build the whole strategy.

The next step is prototyping:

Design thinking is by nature a process of prototyping. When you are on a promising idea, build it. The prototype is usually a drawing, model, or a video describing the product, system or service. We build these models very fast, they are strict and not very elegant, but they work. The aim is not to create approximations of the finished product, or process, the aim is to gather feedback that will help us resolve the problem. In a sense, we build to think.

Prototype tells the story. Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluation process – it generates feedback, which allows you to put the amendments on the fly – and is the process of telling stories. This is the way of visual presentation and experiencing every strategy. – Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Under Brown’s article in form of a dull PowerPoint:

JustProto would like to send special thanks to Maciej Lipiec, who gave authorization for publishing this article. You can find original version of this post written by Maciej on his User Experience Blog – http://uxdesign.pl/

Let’s talk about prototyping

While working as a programmer many times I had to guess what client thinks about. Unfortunately, the specification does not reflect the reality of how the functions should work. This causes lots of problems. First of all, it triggers multiple adjustments, as the customer’s vision is completely different from the vision of the developer.

Fortunately there is a way to improve creating applications and avoid unnecessary (and sometimes time-consuming) amendments. This method is called prototyping.

Prototypes enable showing a vision of how various features and the whole application will look like. They allow the client to set everything as he wants it in the initial phase, and facilitate the subsequent stages of the creation of the site.

I had the opportunity to create a service using the guidelines provided in the prototype. I must admit that supplied the prototype has proved extremely useful and significantly accelerated creation of applications for a simple reason – no unnecessary questions were asked as well as multiple amendments were avoided.

As prototypes are so useful what are the ways of their creation? There are several methods, each radically different from another. Each has some advantages and disadvantages, will take a look at them.

PowerPoint – the use of presentation.

It was one of methods used at our company.

The service sketch is created in an application for creating presentations. It’s strange, but effective. It turns out that a lot of people use this prototyping method.

You can guess the process of creating a prototype in such application looks like. Despite its apparent simplicity and ease of use this method has a significant disadvantage – every time you need to send the resulting file to the client so that they can watch it. Moreover if the prototype needs amendments you must repeat the entire cycle.

Sheet of paper – the traditional way.

IMHO the most funny way to do it. The entire prototype is sketched on a sheet(s) of paper. Do I need to explain how this method seems to be ridiculous for several reasons? The smallest error in the prototype requires recreating it anew. On top of that, sending such a model to a client is quite problem.

Surprisingly Corel used to create paper prototypes, which later were used to test usability. On YouTube you can find a video presenting such a test. I believe that after watching this film there’s no need to mention the deficiencies of such method.

JustProto.com – a new approach to prototyping!

I am proud to introduce on my blog the product in creation of which I had the opportunity to participate. I am talking about justproto.com – tool for online prototyping.

What are the main advantages of our solution? First of all: simplicity. Everything we do is simple because we do not want our users to spend hours learning our tool. Everything has to be intuitive no time lost on getting to know the new environment.

What’s more? Prototypes developed in JustProto are interactive. This means that you can create prototype with dynamic links between the pages.

The online prototype it is available from everywhere, without installing any additional applications.

One of the most important advantages is the creating of a online HTML prototype preview. You simply give your client the link and he will be able to keep track of changes made in the prototype just with refreshing the screen.

JustProto features a free plan and 30 day trial for all other plans. However, if its not enough for you, just contact me (natalia@desmart.com) and I will proivde you a promotional code, to upgrade to 60 days trial.

If you are interested in prototypes try JustProto now!