UX Strategy, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Creating Prototypes for Experiments

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Creating Prototypes for Experiments

The premature outlay of huge amounts of money in pursuit of the wrong strategy is the thing to avoid. You need to have an experimental mindset.*

—CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN

The premise of Lean Startup is to get feedback early and often in order to validate that you are on the right path, which is also the foundation of Tenet 3: Validated User Research. Eric Ries and Steve Blank insist that it’s important to run experiments with your product as soon as possible. This “learn fast” philosophy is now visible in enterprise environments, as evidenced by the popularity of the Google Design Sprints process where teams are given five business days to prototype and test potential solutions.

A successful UX strategy needs rapid experimentation to ensure that your product will deliver a solution that people really want. Thus, you need to jump from your storyboard to a minimum viable product (MVP) or prototype of your product that will be used in experiments in the following chapters. This will allow you to learn as soon as possible if your team’s latest assumptions are on the right track and will force you to confront the reality of what it would take to make your business model work in the real world. Now, as we prepare to prototype, we’re finally juggling all four of the tenets at the same time. (See Figure 7-1.)

FIGURE 7-1

The four tenets of UX strategy

Giving It Your Best Shot

Years before my dad bought ...