Prototyping is a team sport

Late­ly I have been bing­ing on books, pre­sen­ta­tions and arti­cles relat­ed to ‘Lean UX’. I don’t like the term, but then I don’t like the tech industry’s love for invent­ing a new label for every damn thing. I do like the things empha­sis­es: shared under­stand­ing, deep col­lab­o­ra­tion, con­tin­u­ous user feed­back. These are prin­ci­ples that have always implic­it­ly guid­ed the choic­es I made when lead­ing teams at Hub­bub and now also as a mem­ber of sev­er­al teams in the role of prod­uct designer.

In all these lean UX read­ings a thing that keeps com­ing up again and again is pro­to­typ­ing. Pro­to­types are the go-to way of doing ‘exper­i­ments’, in lean-speak. Oth­er things can be done as well—surveys, inter­views, whatever—but more often than not, assump­tions are test­ed with prototypes. 

Which is great! And also unsur­pris­ing as pro­to­typ­ing has real­ly been embraced by the tech world. And tools for rapid pro­to­typ­ing are get­ting a lot of atten­tion and inter­est as a result. How­ev­er, this comes with a cou­ple of risks. For one, some­times it is fine to stick to paper. But the lure of shiny pro­to­typ­ing tools is strong. You’d rather not show a crap­py draw­ing to a user. What if they hate it? How­ev­er, high fideli­ty pro­to­typ­ing is always more cost­ly than paper. So although well-inten­tioned, pro­to­typ­ing tools can encour­age waste­ful­ness, the bane of lean. 

There is a big­ger dan­ger which runs against the lean ethos, though. Some tools afford deep col­lab­o­ra­tion more than oth­ers. Let’s be real: none afford deep­er col­lab­o­ra­tion than paper and white­boards. There is one per­son behind the con­trols when pro­to­typ­ing with a tool. So in my view, one should only ever progress to that step once a team effort has been made to hash out the rough out­lines of what is to be pro­to­typed. Basi­cal­ly: always paper pro­to­type the dig­i­tal pro­to­type. Together. 

I have had a lot of fun late­ly play­ing with brows­er pro­to­types and with pro­to­typ­ing in Framer. But as I was get­ting back into all of this I did notice this risk: All of a sud­den there is a per­son on the team who does the pro­to­types. Unless this solo pro­to­typ­ing is pre­ced­ed by shared pro­to­typ­ing, this is a prob­lem. Because the rest of the team is left out of the think­ing-through-mak­ing which makes the pro­to­typ­ing process so valu­able in addi­tion to the testable arte­facts it outputs.

It is I think a key over­sight of the ‘should design­ers code’ debaters and to an extent one made by all pro­to­typ­ing tool man­u­fac­tur­ers: Indi­vid­u­als don’t pro­to­type, teams do. Pro­to­typ­ing is a team sport. And so the suc­cess of a tool depends not only on how well it sup­ports indi­vid­ual pro­to­typ­ing activ­i­ties but also how well it embeds itself in col­lab­o­ra­tive workflows. 

In addi­tion to the tools them­selves get­ting bet­ter at sup­port­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flows, I would also love to see more tuto­ri­als, both offi­cial and from the com­mu­ni­ty, about how to use a pro­to­typ­ing tool with­in the larg­er con­text of a team doing some form of agile. Most tuto­ri­als now focus on “how do I make this thing with this tool”. Use­ful, up to a point. But a large part of pro­to­typ­ing is to arrive at “the thing” together. 

One of the lean UX things I devoured was this pre­sen­ta­tion by Bill Scott in which he talks about align­ing a pro­to­typ­ing and a devel­op­ment tech stack, so that the gap between design and engi­neer­ing is bridged not just with process­es but also with tool­ing. His exam­ple applies to web devel­op­ment and app devel­op­ment using web tech­nolo­gies. I won­der what a sim­i­lar approach looks like for native mobile app devel­op­ment. But this is the sort of thing I am talk­ing about: Smart think­ing about how to actu­al­ly do this lean thing in the real world. I believe organ­is­ing our­selves so that we can pro­to­type as a team is absolute­ly key. I will pick my tools and process­es accord­ing­ly in future.

All of the above is as usu­al most­ly a reminder to self: As a design­er your role is not to go off and work solo on bril­liant pro­to­types. Your role is to facil­i­tate such efforts by the whole team. Sure, there will be solo deep design­er­ly craft­ing hap­pen­ing. But it will not add up to any­thing if it is not embed­ded in a col­lab­o­ra­tive design and devel­op­ment framework.

Running

Running the bay

I have start­ed run­ning. I nev­er thought I would. I think I was put off run­ning in high school when dur­ing phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion they would occa­sion­al­ly force us to run 5k out of the blue. I remem­ber it was tor­ture. I nev­er did par­tic­u­lar­ly well and was sore after­wards so I came to asso­ciate it with fail­ure and tedi­um and so on.

When we moved to Sin­ga­pore I decid­ed I would do some more exer­cise and at some point read this thing about how run­ning is a cheap and easy way to get some exer­cise in and that it is par­tic­u­lar­ly fun to do with your partner.

My wife has always been a run­ner so I sug­gest­ed we start­ed run­ning togeth­er. She was sur­prised I think but agreed it would be a good idea. The next week­end I went and got a pair of shoes and that same day we were off to our first run.

In the begin­ning it was a hard to find good routes. I could not man­age much more than 3k which did not help. But 3k turned into 5k. Around that time we found a field in the neigh­bour­hood we could do laps around. When that became bor­ing we decid­ed to switch to the bay, a very pop­u­lar spot, and we start­ed doing 6–8k runs there. We’ve been stick­ing to that ever since.

Now we run rough­ly two to three times a week. Some­times we try one of the parks and run some trails. I find I enjoy trail run­ning even more because it is less about speed and more about aware­ness. And there is more to see so it nev­er gets boring.

We were on hol­i­day on Bali the oth­er week and I brought my gear and ran some trails through rice fields and along the beach there as well and it struck me that this is pos­si­bly the great­est thing about run­ning. You can do it any­where you go, and once you build up a decent amount of sta­mi­na, your legs will take you wher­ev­er it is you want to go. It is an incred­i­bly lib­er­at­ing feeling.

It took a bit of doing to get to that point. But now that I’ve reached it, I’m hooked.