Last week was Reading Week (the Canadian version of Spring Break?) which should have given me some extra time to post up the latest happenings in class, but alas, it was not to be.
We’ve moved onto the second part of the course which focuses on a “cheap” method, a type of rapid prototyping we’ll call Assumption Prototyping. Although it could be easily argued that this technique could fall under “fast” and is in actuality a somewhat mutated form of prototyping. (Hey, this is UX for the real world, right? I can take liberties.)
A good friend introduced this particular prototyping technique to me – it’s something that he invented and plays very nicely with startups a la Lean UX, minimum viable products, and the like. We are all familiar with the ideal iterative design process…it’s goes a little something like this:
(Of course, everyone has their own labels/methodology, but essentially it’s research–>requirements–>design).
But what do you do when your time is extremely limited? And you just need to quickly throw something together to validate the concept, whether it’s to see if the idea is even viable or to align your stakeholders? Enter our friend the humble Assumption Prototype:
The prototypes my class will be building will be for a (nonprofit) Children’s Hospital and tackle several different contexts of use, including mobile, web & environment. The twist? One hour to interview stakeholders, and three hours to build the prototype…errr, that is, air our assumptions!
Stay tuned to see what develops.