In 2014, I’ve attended to the Lean UX Bootcamp at ustwo, the design company that created Monument Valley. During this day, we had the opportunity to design, build a paper prototype and test a concept for an app. In this post, I will try to come up with some lessons learnt this day and a little bit of the process!
First, we had to design an app for members of a gym in London. For that, the facilitators of the workshop gave us a lot of content to work with. Personas, customer journeys, company’s goals and so on. It was a mix of consumer + company information. We had to translate all this content into something meaningful. In the workshop, this was organised through:
– a box with all the good things and benefits from the new digital app to illustrate our design goal
– hypothesis statements
– assumptions (for each stakeholder involved in the journey)
Translating the content into goals was extremely useful as we could focus and keep our ideas “in place”.
Getting feedback
After a brainstorm, we’ve managed to design the first version of the app in paper. This was our way to start testing the concept. We’ve walked around the company for a “free” participant. As we know, we don’t need many participants to find mistakes. Very simple task, but very useful (I will never forget). We had one observer and one interviewer. The workshop facilitators gave us a guideline for asking questions and interviewing for user testing. We’ve defined a few tasks and asked the participant to give us some feedback. After the feedback session, we’ve shared with the whole group what worked and what didn’t work. This would give us more content for the next iteration.
Refine
After the feedback, we could refine our design in paper. For this stage, we’ve used the app called POP for paper prototyping, to develop a more “contextual” interaction. This means that now users could actually test using a mobile phone. We’ve conducted a small test with the other participants of other groups and shared our overall experience during the process.
What I took from this day was the idea of getting feedback as quick as possible and that using paper could be “basic” but it tests concepts before the whole development.
To finish the day, we’ve managed to visit the studio where game designers were developing new levels of Monument Valley! This was amazing! It is clear that they use a very similar approach for the design of their games! We know that paper prototyping in games is very useful.
What I took from this day was the idea of getting feedback as quick as possible and that using paper could be “basic” but it tests concepts before the whole development. This is crucial in any type of development (since products to just “ideas”). Since then, I’ve been utilising a very similar approach. So all I can say it’s thank you very much ustwo and IT Utility for the opportunity! :)
Read more:
UX Bootcamp at Ustwo
User Experience (UX) Design Boot Camp – a lean approach to mobile app development (1 of 3)
Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business
UX resources