Prototyping as you innovate

When striving for social innovation, the process for creating new ideas and products must be approached with care. Otherwise, great ideas may fall to the wayside because of poor design (numerous examples can be seen at http://www.baddesigns.com/index.html). Too often products for business, government and/or social enterprises turn into a waste of resources or perform in a suboptimal manner. Take, for example, the clean water in India that cannot be carried because of the shape of the container (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation/). Or how often have you pushed a door when it should be pulled?

Before these products were built and produced on a mass scale, they should have seen multiple user tests. As designers we cannot predict how something will be used, handled, or treated. Paper prototyping is a cheap and easy way to test a product, well before you have spent many resources to build it. Draw out your application, give it ‘pieces’ and ‘buttons’ with separate parts of paper, and show it to a user. Test what task they can accomplish and how.

A clean and cheap water supply in India may alleviate many health dangers. However, if the residents will not use the water then there is no purpose. Use cardboard to design the water container, weigh it down with rocks to the appropriate weight, and hand it to a local Indian woman. The design flaw could have been caught right then and there.

It’s also important to think about the end users of the products and how that affects the testers. With the water example, the gender of the user proves important because usually the men are working all day. Men tend to be stronger than women so it would be necessary to give the women a water-heavy container.

Through this process, you may also discover additional ideas that could be even better. You can think about something for a long time, but seeing a user in action will always provide a new perspective.