The key to success: share your ideas early and often.
Activate the feedback loop as early as you can — Photo by ThisIsEngineering
Minimum Verbal Prototype
One of the simplest prototypes you can create is to describe your idea to someone else.
What if we
Why don’t we
Imagine that we
Your Minimum Verbal Prototype or MVP is a more rounded description of your idea — not just one of many ideas on a list. Your verbal outline creates the first impression and helps someone understand your initial intent.
The MVP is the kick to begin representing your idea in a more tangible way.
The Word prototype is from Greek prōtotypon “a first or primitive form,” from prōtos “first” + typos ‘impression, mould, pattern.”
Prototyping is not the goal. Feedback is.
A different way to approach prototyping is:
To engineer as many opportunities for feedback as you can.
Feedback is the main reason we share drafts. Rough and ready versions give us the chance to test and think about what works and what doesn’t.
And to truly understand how bad our ideas are.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas.
When you share a First Verbal Prototype, you activate a feedback loop to develop your creative ideas.
Remember, the only thing worse than a bad idea is to isolate an idea from feedback for too long.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them grow and get stronger, starved of it, and your ideas weaken.
This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.
Prototyping is all about the process of generating multiple versions of a solution so you can continually improve it.
Prototyping is one of the later stages of the design process and is normally folowed by a period of testing. You can make a prototype without testing it. This stage normally follows on from a time when you and your team have generated and filtered a range of ideas.
It would also be true to say that the sooner you are prototyping and testing the better as this often instigates new thinking quite quickly.
A different way of thinking about this stage is that prototyping is to engineer as many opportunities for feedback as you can. Feedback is the main reason anyone creates rough versions of anything. Rough and ready versions give us the chance to test and think about what works and what doesn’t. And to truly understand how bad our ideas are.
You have to remember that the only thing that is worse than a bad idea is one that has been isolated from feedback for too long.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them to grow and get stronger, starved of it and your ideas will get weaker.
When you create a rough prototype, first draft or early sketch you are using iteration to develop your creative ideas.
Often the first prototype you can create is the moment you describe your idea to someone else.
What if we…
Imagine that you…
Your FVP (first verbal prototype) is the kick to then begin representing your idea in a more tangible way.
I developed this little decision tree to help you and your students think through some ideas for prototyping.
A Visual Prototype will be one that focuses on the look (and feel) of the product, but it will not function. You will likely focus on:
Sketches and illustrations
Storyboarding a short video
Digital / paper wireframes
Creating the packaging for your product
Making an advert for your service
Photo sequence for a new service
On-the-shelf mockup (placing your new packaging alongside competitors in a real store)
A Functional Prototype will be one that focuses on showing how something will work, even in a rudimentary way. The visual quality will be ignored.
3D printing
Paper prototype and mockup
App mockup
PPT or Google Slides for a website mockup
Bodystorming a service (using roleplay to act it out)
Cardboard life scale mockup
You might also explore the following reflection promtpts to help you make the most of the prototyping process.
Which type of prototype is most feasible / useful in the time you have?
Why is your choice appropriate for the solution you are exploring?
What resources and support will you need to build your prototype?
Who are you testing your prototype on?
What specific aspects of your idea do you want feedback on?
How will you record feedback and ideas?
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I discovered the little app POP by Marvel which is a fantastic way to quickly prototype ideas for apps. I drew around my phone and then did some sketches. Took some photos and added some links and hotspots and then you have a little functioning app.
Sketches
Hotspots
App screens
Took me 5 minutes (including downloading the app) a great example of a functioning prototype. I need to work on the visuals!
Feedback strategy is often focused on Giving feedback, but this is only part of the process. We have lots of assessment tactics for providing, offering and giving feedback, but little on receiving it.
This post outlines a feedback strategy to help you or your students receive feedback successfully.
The Feedback Dynamic
“It takes two to tango”, as the song goes, and the dynamic of feedback depends on a relationship between two (or more) people.
The feedback giver
The receiver of feedback
It is common for us to have feedback strategies for giving feedback, but we can also develop feedback strategies to receive critique effectively.
Receiving feedback has a unique set of skills, strategies, and dispositions. We overlook these too often and then wonder why feedback is not effective.
The 30 Percent Feedback Strategy
30% feedback is a feedback strategy for the receiver. It signals to the feedback giver your overall progress. Is it 30% complete or 90% complete?
You are referring to the progress of whatever you are making or creating. You might be writing an article or essay or creating a piece of artwork. Whatever the subject of the feedback is, signal the progress you believe you have made.
Consider these two statements: “This is 95% complete” and “I just started, it is about 10% done”. Imagine the mindset of these two people or students. Do you notice the difference? The different attitudes are essential to the effective receiving of feedback.
Don’t Polish Anything
I first came across this technique from Jason Freedman’sblog post and realised how useful it would be for students seeking feedback from others. Jason explains that he learned it from a colleague at 42Floors:
It’s a trick I learned from our investor, Seth Lieberman. It came about because I once asked him for feedback on a product mockup, and he asked if I felt like I was ninety percent done or thirty percent done. If I was ninety percent done, he would try to correct me on every little detail possible because otherwise a typo might make it into production. But if I had told him I was only thirty percent done, he would gloss over the tiny mistakes, knowing that I would correct them later. He would engage in broader conversations about what the product should be.
In this particular case, I was indeed ninety percent done and so we debated a few details, I got my pat on the back, and I moved on.
As he was leaving, he said:
“Next time come to me when you’re only thirty percent done and I’ll give you thirty percent feedback.”
So a few months later on a different project, I came to him with some questions on a project that was still in its early stages and we wrestled with the direction together. I didn’t polish anything and he made sure not to critique things he knew I would fix later. It was really freeing. I knew I wasn’t putting my best foot forward and he didn’t care. He was able to help me shift course without the sunk cost of throwing away a ton of work. Really awesome.
Jason Freedman
Imagine the time and energy you save if the feedback you offer is more targeted and you respond to these precise progress signals.
Your Progress Bar
For students, it could be as simple as a progress bar with their work.
What percentage do you think you have completed?
How much more do you think there is to do?
Before you receive feedback, signal to the other person your progress, talk about the features of early feedback and how later feedback is different.
The progress bar could even have markers for when to seek feedback to help structure those opportunities.
A Mindset Ready for Feedback
We need to help our students be open to feedback much earlier on in the making process.
Whether writing, drawing or building, being open to early feedback takes a specific, deliberate mindset switched to ‘open’ and ‘growth’.
This strategy’s key to success is a shared understanding of 30% or 90% feedback. We can develop our understanding of these levels and increase our readiness to offer the most appropriate support.
This responsibility also falls on the receiver. The additional signals they can offer to help us improve what they are doing.
Just remember feedback is a two-way street. We may refine our protocols for giving feedback, but there are many strategies we can implement to help us and our students receive feedback successfully.
I bump into different views of what “prototyping” is, should be or could be quite regularly. It is interesting to try and help people, especially educators, change the way they perceive a word and begin to use it, even understand it, in new ways. After all language is such a decisive factor in our willingness to understand and so to change.
Although not a designer by trade I know that prototyping is about making versions of something, creating various attempts and that these attempts have a trajectory. A direction they are heading towards. An outcome their production is seeking. I get that this is an iterative approach, resting on the knowledge that we will gradually get better through advice and comment from others.
Ultimately though a prototype’s success lies in the mindset or disposition that they are created with. Or to say it more clearly, when we make stuff if we are iterative in our approach we are more likely to succeed. But there is a lot going on if we begin to consider prototyping as not just about making something, but a disposition too.
It is not just about junk modelling or computer aided design or 3D printing or physical building – a disposition towards prototyping means we:
Are committed to the expertise and ideas we might gain from others and don’t just simply rely on our own perspective.
Believe in the value of feedback and how critique can move our ideas forward.
Engineer as many opportunities for feedback as we can, as early as we can.
Are willing to share what we create when it is extremely, painfully incomplete.
Learning, and often learning within a school, can be such a creative process, I know that teaching is one of the most creative of professions I know. The prototyping disposition is a stance we need to consider for our learners and for ourselves.
All too often our design of the creative tasks we ask our students to embark upon do not signpost these perspectives. Constraint is rare and we open the doors for our students to emotionally commit to a project, a creation, whether prose or painting it is much the same.
Simply stating the traits of an iterative or prototyping approach is far from enough – we need to consider how we can design them into scaffolded or modelled tasks. For example increasing the constraint of resourcing and time when we get started.
“You have 5 minutes to write the first 2 sentences and yes you can only use a post-it note. Ready go!”
What comes next is easy to understand – feedback and feedforward. Next steps and critique. So much has been written about the high impact on student outcomes of high quality feedback that I do not have to restate it. What perhaps does need pointing out is how woven it is into the fabric of an iterative creative process. So let us look again at how we might model this approach in all of our work and consider ways to engineer multiple versions followed up with as many feedback opportunities.
Prototyping is not just about physical modelling, it is an iterative mindset towards anything that we, or our students, create.
