Lately many of our daily digital experiences have become bite-sized. Mobile applications, social games, micro-blogging, photo and video sharing, personal metrics, RSS feeds and text messages are all examples of growing addiction for experience snacks.  Some have worried that this miniaturization is reducing our attention span, and that may be the case.  But in addition to representing a change in how we consume, this trend allows for a shift in how we create the experiences themselves.

Waterfall development brings ideas to light late in the game.

When we were focused on creating robust destination website experiences, our process mirrored the software development approach.  These complex experiences required significant up-front research before anything was designed.  The benefits of this approach were that experiences had a strong strategic foundation and design was heavily vetted before there was an investment (usually substantial) in development.  The disadvantage is that a good amount of time was invested before concepts saw the light of day.

Over the past few years, we’ve been working on compressing the waterfall process that this kind of development represented, driving more collaboration up front to get to concepts and even prototypes faster and iterate from there.  Still, the big site development habits linger and we seem scared to move very far without justifying everything first with research.  We look, prod, test, study before we even think about leaping, making sure we’ll land on firm ground.  But with the new, bite-sized world, a fall isn’t really fatal.  So why not take a leap without all that looking?  Why not start with a prototype?

Collaborate early, prototype early

Getting to a prototype doesn’t have to be as hard as we like to make it.  In many cases (especially with the distinct, app-like experiences many consumers are drawn to these days) a day or even half-day workshop with a mix of stakeholders and a cross-disciplinary agency team would provide a good foundation.  Working from the team’s understanding of the goals, challenges and constraints of both the business and consumer can be enough to whiteboard out an initial vision.  With a variety of prototyping tools available now (a chapter of Todd Warfel’s Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide posted on the User Interface Engineering site talks about some popular choices), a usable prototype for many experiences can be created from this level of design quite quickly.

While not completely vetted by research yet, this prototype could serve a few purposes.  It can provide a concrete vision for the effort, demonstrating ‘this is where we’re trying to go’ to drive conversation and help build buy-in through participation.  It can provide an immediate outlet for sacred cows by visualizing them and getting them out of the way earlier.  It can provide an earlier stepping-stone towards iterative product development; much the way prototypes are used in startups or product design. But most importantly, it can provide a catalyst for consumer and stakeholder insight gathering.

Give them something to talk about

Typical early-stage research is abstract.  It explores behaviors or perceptions in a vacuum.  It’s academic in a sense.  But with a prototype, you can move beyond the limits of the survey or interview question and simply observe. You can see how a consumer or a stakeholder reacts.  How they play with it.  How they describe it.  How they don’t describe it. You can use it as a springboard for conversation to uncover surprises, gaps and opportunities.  “We were trying to find out things we didn’t even know to ask about,” a Disney show producer said about their prototype research in one of many articles on prototyping cited on Steve Portigal’s blog.

Creating a prototype at the beginning doesn’t remove the necessity or opportunity for the usual depth of research.  It adds a focus, acting as a concrete hypothesis that you can test in your stakeholder interviews, your ethnography, even your surveys. And just a little taste of the future may just be the thing to break away from the expectations and habits of the present.

What other benefits (or pitfalls) do you see in this approach?

– David Lewis, Executive Director, Strategy, Organic, Inc.