Chapter 7The Key Roles of Stories and Prototypes in Design Thinking1
Mark Zeh
Introduction
Stories and prototypes play essential roles within a design thinking process. They are the “glue” that binds the process together. Together, they contain both the problem to be solved and a hypothesis about how to solve it.
Stories and prototypes serve as a means of communication between customers and product developers, enabling the mapping of rational and emotional customer needs to concepts and ideas. This chapter contains a description of the roles of stories and prototypes within a design thinking product development process and discussion on how to create and use them. These are illustrated with an example from industry.
7.1 A Design Thinking Product Development Framework
Since the product development processes in every organization differ by things such as number of phases, important milestones, and so on, they must integrate design thinking into their processes in differing ways (Brown, 2008, 2009; Martin, 2009). In this section, a general product development process will be used to describe how stories and prototypes are created and evolve throughout the development cycle.
The product development process diagrammed in Figure 7.1 has been divided up into three general phases of work: Identify User Needs and Find the Value Proposition; Build, Test, Iterate, and Refine; and Validate and Communicate Broadly.
Figure 7.1 Three general product development process blocks and their ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
