VII. Prototyping

Prototyping Strategy

Based on the above "how might we" question and design principles, we crowd-sourced a very wide variety of service ideas from Aalto University students, teachers and service providers. This pool of ideas became the rich source of our prototypes.

Our prototyping strategy was to test out as many small bits and pieces as possible, of all levels from the strategy and mechanism to function and interface. We did not hesitate to show it to users and test it even if the fidelity was not high to get useful feedback. In this way we planned to ensure that our service proposal was validated down to the smallest detail.

It was of course not possible to plan this process entirely in a strategic way. The actual process was never a linear process, it went back and forth, and there were many unexpected byproducts revealed during the process. The key of the strategy was to formulate small hypotheses in different levels, put them into prototypes, test them on real users, and reflect the feedback back into the service so that the whole service proposition could be built with the set of well-validated building blocks.