Reflection- Prototyping

Challenge

The tool I chose is prototyping. I just got accepted as an operations officer for a big

project in my university. We are going to start building a Technology Business Incubator. I am in

charge of handling the project team’s daily tasks, ideation and recruitment of incubatees in the

program. Furthermore, I am responsible for managing events, finance, and logistics. As a

first-timer, I did not really know how I was going to do my job. Being in operations means that

there will be a lot of moving parts and I did not know where to start. I remember I do a lot of

User Experience Research and one aspect of the job is doing prototyping. My first task is to

come up with a system to organize all the things I need to work on (ideation, recruitment, events

management, finance, logistics).    Selection

Prototyping allows us to make abstract new ideas tangible to potential partners and

customers. These include storyboarding, user scenarios, experience journeys, and business

concept illustrations — all of which encourage deep involvement by important stakeholders to

provide feedback. I think this is the best way to test systems and to know whether it will work or

not.     Application

Me and my team had 5 things to prepare, so we made a business concept illustration on

how ideation, recruitment, events management, finance, and logistics can all work together. The

team did not fully understand the concept, as it was more on the visual side and it lacked

explanation. Since prototyping is all about iteration, we scratched the idea of a business concept

illustration and shifted to user scenario.

When we were making the user scenario, our focus was about getting the whole team on

the same page. Our user scenario prototype displayed different situations to begin our planning

and execution. It involved different contingencies should anything happen to be ready for

unexpected events. Additionally, five different stakeholders were given five different scenarios

as a survey. This helped our team in determining the best plan possible for every scenario. The

survey included questions about our plans, understanding the process and the prioritization of

tasks, and feelings about the change. This was conducted two months before our proper

planning phase within a three-day timeframe.

Insight

By applying prototyping in our project, specifically user scenarios, we were able to

identify the problems that need to be addressed primarily. Prototyping gave us the freedom to

iterate our work to constantly improve our designs and systems. Visualization and concept

illustrations will not work in this setup since our problem involved systematic processes. Having

the vision of what we wanted to do was not enough. It was too abstract. What we needed was

workflows to map out all the situations and the steps needed to take to solve the problem.     Approach

Given that our task is all about creating plans and our team are all proficient in UX

Research and Design, prototyping was the best and most appropriate design thinking tool for

us. We just need to gain more knowledge and insights and review them thoroughly. Prototyping

should reflect all the values involved in design thinking and should always be directed to the

next stages of the design process.

