ITERATION
It’s easy to fall into the trap of racing ahead the second your idea gains traction. But you should take your time. Iteration will save you time in the end. When you iterate you manage risk by repeatedly testing your assumptions and answering more refined questions.
So, how do you start iterating?
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List your questions
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Prioritize your top questions
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Ideate to explore options
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Prototype to build, share and reflect
Once you have been through your first round of rapid prototyping, it’s time to start tackling step one of iterating. Sit down with your idea and look at it with the three lenses of design thinking: Desirability, Feasibility and Viability.
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As you return to each of these lenses, what questions do you have? What assumptions are you making? Make a list of your questions for each of the lenses.
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Next you need to prioritize the top questions on your list. Try to figure out which questions you need to answer first. What’s the level of urgency and dependency? You will get to all of your questions eventually but you need a place to start.
Sit down with team members and stakeholders to talk through all of the questions, decide which lens is important to you, do you want to make your product more desirable? or more affordable?
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Now you need to ideate the best answers to your top questions. Before you take your idea to the next level, you will actually diverge and converge again, but not as wildly as in previous sessions.
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Return to prototyping, continue to build and share with others to answer questions about Desirability, Feasibility and Viability.
Desirability: Zoom out from your ideas and solutions, to make sure you understand the underlying needs. As you continue to iterate, ask yourself: What else do you need to know about your user, their context, and the space where your solution sits?
What do you need to better understand about the user’s life, needs, motivations or values to help you create a valuable solution that moves beyond obvious and low-hanging fruit? Also consider how or when your user will interact with your idea and what role it might play in their life.
Feasibility: Get real about how this will exist in the world. Ask yourself questions like: What will this actually look/feel/smell/taste/sound like? What will the form factor be? How will it work? How will it be made? What are the mechanics of creating this solution? Can it exist considering the laws of physics, and finance? Will it actually have the intended effect (solve the need)? How will you know? What will you measure?
Be wary of the ‘magic lamp’ effect when considering an app or website solution. It’s easy to say it will do x, y, and z. But will it really? It might do the things you build it to do, but what might be the consequences for the people you are looking to help? ‘Technology’ is not the answer to everything! It also raises an existential question: When does technology make the world more human-centered? When does it not?
Viability: How will your solution exist in, or interplay with, current systems and infrastructures? What do you need to consider to make this sustainable from a business perspective? What are the potential unintended consequences of your solution, or the steps needed to make it a reality? And if all else fails, remember to go back to real people and their real experiences. Sure, all of the questions above may be important to creating a valuable solution that can sustainably exist in the world. But some questions need to be answered before others. It doesn’t much matter if your solution makes viable business sense if you aren’t confident that your users actually need it!
– Source: Diverge workshop from prototype feedback ALStarr75
TIP:
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Before you move to refining an idea, you need to make sure you are satisfying a real need. Consider how you might diverge again to understand different angles of the problem or need you are addressing (desirability), to test entirely different ways (feasibility) of solving for the need, and business models and methods for bringing your solution into the world (viability).
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Put your audience in the room. You need your audience to care about the problem you are solving. Use rich details, stories of real people, or anecdotes from your feedback sessions to create empathy in your audience for your user. It’s easier to get your audience to care when you introduce them to a real person with a real problem.
Create your pitch, tell your story...
Now that you have refined your idea, it’s feasible, viable and of course desirable, you need to share it with the world, it’s time to tell a story.
– Source: Example pitch for a VR puzzle game ALStarr75
Why not read Service Design – Journey Mapping >