 Hey everyone, welcome to from pen and paper product item product by Muneesh Mali. So we are glad that you all can join us today. So just a reminder that on your right you'll see a discuss button. So you'll have to post your questions in the Q&A section over there. And without any further delay over to you. Cool. Thank you, Sezu. Hi everyone. Let me first share my screen. Give me a second. I want to say it's great to see you all. Unfortunately, I cannot see you all. But good to know that so many people are here attending this conference and this talk. So it's really my pleasure to be with you today from actually the COVID capital of India. So let me start with a bit of a quiz. How many of you know where I am right now? Where is this COVID capital of India that I'm talking about? If you could put in your comments in the chat box, I'll be able to see it. Okay. I see a couple of responses there. Yes, it is. Interestingly, I'm in Pune, not in Mumbai. So Pune is currently the COVID capital. So I really hope that you and your families are keeping safe and healthy. I mean, overcast, rainy, COVID struck Pune. Although this virtual platform is great and it's allowing us to be able to meet virtually. This is going to be a short 20-minute talk and I'll try my best to be able to wrap it up soon so that I have time for one or two questions in the end. But if not, there'll still be time in the VIP rooms and we could connect there as well. I'm here to share my experience on how we can use some simple techniques to accelerate decision making and reduce the risk in building strategic products. So a bit about me, my name is Munish Malik. I'm a senior product manager with Equal Experts and previously I was working with Springer Nature. Now there are simple and powerful ways that can help us to reduce the risk of starting new initiatives and get real feedback quickly. I will share one such case study where simple techniques of using a pen and paper to create paper prototypes help us answer complex business problems and validate business ideas. Since just about 18 minutes would be left, so I'm not going to be too prescriptive about these techniques. Rather, I want to encourage you to think simple, to validate business ideas and I will let you experience it through a challenge that we were solving at Springer Nature. So with that, I'll get started. As product managers, product and UX designers and entrepreneurs, there are some key questions that we grapple with quite often such as which is the right problem to solve or which idea or solution should we invest in. The idea validation can take months. How can we really make this feedback loop rapid, quick and iterative? Now validating complex business ideas need not be complex. There are simple and powerful techniques that make the idea validation quick, fast and also iterative. I will focus on one of them today and as I said previously, I will explain that through a challenge that we were solving at Springer Nature for scientists and researchers across life sciences. But to talk about the challenge, researchers trying to find the right protocol for their life sciences experiment is a very daunting task. A researcher may spend hours in their laboratories or outside sometimes hundreds of hours in a year only to find the right protocol that she would be able to make it work in her environment. Now you may ask, what is a protocol? Like how we need a recipe to prepare a certain dish. Now a recipe usually looks like some instructions with some ingredients to use and how many steps it entails and what to do at each step for how long. In scientific research, such a recipe that is a list of instructions could be supplemented with some illustrations like pictures or video to conduct an experiment is called a protocol. Now protocols from various sources are available to the researcher and as I said that he or she may spend hours only to find the right protocol to make it work in her environment. As you can imagine, these protocols are very complex. Unlike the food recipes, for instance, the exact quantity, specification, time, availability of the chemicals to be used during an experiment are all a part of that protocol. Now reviewing each reference of the protocol to understand its relevance can take a lot of time. So finding the right protocol is very, very important that usually takes a large amount of time. Now in today's COVID-19 world, it is a scenario that we all can relate to. Imagine a scientist researching for vaccines or drugs spends invaluable hours only to find the right protocol and now multiply this time with so many researches going on across the world. So this is where the product that we were building called Springer Nature Experiments comes in. Springer Nature Experiments is a research solution allowing researchers to quickly find and evaluate the protocols and methods across life sciences. This platform combines portfolios across Springer Nature resources, which is the largest in life sciences to make searching for experiments easy and effective. So how did we go about it? It all begins with understanding the target audience to build a deeper empathy with their problems, to build user personas, understand their needs. And I think that is where the journey of a product should begin. So the UX team at Springer Nature conducted a lot of user research, met scientists across geographies and countries to build that empathy and understanding of the users, their needs and came back with wealth of knowledge that was very useful in how we build the product. At the next stage when we are conceptualizing a product, typically there are lots of ideas and starting points. Teams usually have a lot of debates and discussions brainstorming through such in sections and collaborative workshops. There are a lot of solutions or designs that get discussed. So it is important to find ways to be able to test those designs or concepts quickly with the target users to get validation, get the needed feedback and move into product delivery with confidence. Now what helps in the ideation sessions is getting simple things such as a pen and paper out. Drawing and sketching ideas using pen and paper are super helpful. Now sketching is an excellent way to quickly explore various concepts and ideas. The great thing about sketching is that it is not just limited to designers and you do not need to be a professional artist to produce a design or a sketch. Even though you may think you don't know how to draw or you don't know how to sketch, trust me, you do. You just have to try that. So we collaborated on various designs and concepts of various screens that you wanted to test and lay them out in user flows of how the journey of the user could be once he or she uses the platform. I won't give a technical definition of design thinking, but we have interestingly already touched upon the first three aspects of it. Where we started with understanding our users to build a deeper empathy with their problems and needs. We then spoke about the discovery and inception stage where we built a shared understanding about what are the right problems to solve. And then during the ideation workshops, we created some sketches of the ideas and the concepts that we wanted to test. I would now talk about the prototype and the test stages of design thinking. I would focus on one such technique for which all you need is a pen and paper and perhaps a pair of scissors. Paper prototypes involves sketching designs on paper and seeing how a user would interact with it. Now the facilitator would ask the user to perform a use case using those prototypes and as you can see in the image based on where the user presses or selects on the prototype the sketch can change and we can introduce a new screen which has been sketched or a new snippet of it. The shared understanding of our users, their needs and problems helped us to understand what are the right concepts and ideas to be able to test and this led us to build the paper prototypes that you wanted to test with the researchers to validate our direction, our product concept and the high level designs of the solution. Now through a short video, let me share some examples of the paper prototypes for the challenge that we were solving. And if I remind you of the challenge which was to help the scientist find the most efficient and effective protocol to conduct a life sciences experiment. So I have a recorded video, I hope the experience is not that bad so let me start with that. As you can see I have a few sketches of the designs that I would like to test and I have some extra papers, I have some sticky notes to be able to make changes to it or add new things, make notes or annotate it and I have a pair of scissors as well in case I like to cut and create some new paper prototypes. With that let's get started so I'll put these two slightly on one side to focus on the current one. See this is one of the designs of the homepage that we wanted to test amongst some other designs of course. Something like this is what we presented to the researchers involved in this early testing phase. This is the homepage of a new product that would help them find the most relevant and most important protocols and methods in life sciences experiments. As you can imagine the user looked at it. There are several links through which she or she can enter the product for every such prototype sketch we have a conversation with the user. For instance in this case what do they think about this homepage and the various areas or the various links that are there on it and take their feedback. As I mentioned earlier one of the things that are really very very helpful and convenient are to be able to make changes to it on the fly depending on how the conversation really goes and how to remove things from it depending upon what the user really sees. See our user chooses to select the search bar and decides to type DNA as she's interested to find protocols matching the technique of DNA extraction so we try to simulate that behavior and we put this DNA, the moment user types DNA and what to suggest shows up with these options. Since the user is interested to find protocols matching the technique of DNA extraction that is one of the values as well. So we have a bit of a conversation with the user about the search bar and how the order suggestion shows up and that ways we can use this design and use this behavior to have a conversation and get some feedback. So the user selects DNA extraction and we have a search results that matched that interaction that the user just did and the search results page shows up where the user can see the overall results count various protocols along with a snippet of that protocol you know how much time does the protocol take how many downloads does that protocol have had has some pagination options, some filtering options on the left so we discuss the design and discuss whether this is something that the user was expecting and see that DNA extraction and we collect useful feedback. So the user is interested to filter down the search results a bit more and wants to narrow it down further and selects a technique of cell and tissue culture. Again we have prototypes to match various interactions that the user can do so we have one to match this as well. The moment user selects a particular facet the search results get narrowed down further let's say they become slightly lesser and these new set of search results show up. The user wants to filter down the search results even more and then wants to maybe use the publication here slider as she saw and wants to use this to come somewhere out here to be able to see the protocols between the years 1984 to say 2002 as you would expect the search results get narrowed down further and this is the new set of search results that then show up. Again the results count has really come down and hopefully the user is trying to get to where she wants to be and then uses this sorting option which currently has a default value available so the moment the user clicks on this something like this is what we had created for sorting and then the user is interested to find the protocols that are most cited. The moment user clicks on most cited we have this new set of search results that then show up in the order of the ones that are more cited and let's say eventually the user gets to the one that she was really looking for so the user clicks on it the protocol that she is interested to view further and a new screen that talks more about that protocol shows up each of these sketches that are presented to you allows us to have a dialogue with the user have a conversation with the user and take her feedback on what she thinks of it. As you saw how convenient it became to test the paper prototype without much investment without a single line of code or software being written until now. Once there was a basic validation and feedback to the product concept initial designs we then moved to some low-fidelity digital prototypes where we built those in a couple of days and we could build an aggregated search in accessing the various protocol resources and the websites from Springer Nature that we had access to and put them all on a search result screen that the user could actually then interact with and play it as well so from paper prototype we moved to a bit digital but still kept things very plain and simple but allowed the user to actually engage with it and we could see how that experience was. I know it's a short talk but you know I also want to show you how the product currently looks like as well so the product is now live and it's called experiments.springernatures.com and as you can see the homepage is definitely much better in how those initial designs look as you would expect but the search bar continues to be very prominent and some key feedback that we got from our testing as well is that we simulate the behavior of the DNA extraction search and as you can see there are of course search results that show up matching the technique of DNA extraction there are more such filtering options on the left hand side than what we presented in those initial designs and the sorting options actually have become these tabs so that the user can quickly access it and see it as well right at front. The product continues to invite users to participate in more user research to allow the product to keep on getting better as the user feedback or the journey to collect user feedback should never really stop. I'll go further. Now there are several benefits of using such paper prototyping techniques as you saw it is quick and through rapid iterations you can try various concepts. This one is my favorite it is high on honesty and low on loyalty because it doesn't take too much effort to build them the users are rather comfortable in critiquing a paper prototype without really worrying about what the facilitator will feel and similarly the creators are not attached to them and can jump them without losing heart as well. Such prototyping is usually collaborative involving the team so it is a lot of fun to build them and promote team bonding and even though you think you don't know how to sketch as I said previously you do you have to try and just go along with sketching it and see how it goes for you and as I mentioned earlier as well it carries very little investment so there's not much cost attached to it. I should add like everything else in the world this is not a silver bullet and there are times when paper prototyping or other low fidelity prototyping techniques will not work in those situations there are high fidelity prototypes and usability testing techniques that we continue to use in spring editor experiments as well and of course then there are design sprints which addresses the prototype testing from a well defined process but since this again is a very short talk I'm going to leave that for further conversations in our Q&A session as we come to the end I want to leave you with a couple of concepts the first one being the democratization of design so activities like sketching or joint ideation workshops are great examples of how the design process has now been democratized and allows non-designers and businesses and technology to be a part of the design process so I know there are both people on both sides but of course this further leads us to democratizing the innovation process as well so in the words of IDEO if I try to describe it I think they say that design thinking brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is viable from an economical point of view and what is technologically feasible as well so it allows people who aren't trained as designers to be a part of the design process much earlier and in fact bridges the gap between designers and brings other capabilities such as technology, people, business and in fact even users earlier in the designing stage and hence we democratize the whole design and innovation process so thank you for attending the talk we are coming close to the end of it and special thanks to Springer Nature and the Springer Nature experiments team before the Q&A in the end I would like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dieter Rams and I would also like to encourage you to use pen and paper more often I think Linda Rising in her keynote the other day at the agile light conference spoke about how writing our thoughts and experiences using a pen and paper can actually help alleviate our stress during these difficult times of coronavirus so anyways I'm running out of my time so thank you so much for attending the talk and I would be happy to take questions if we have time thank you thank you so much everyone for attending today's session and thank you so much Muneesh for sharing our experience with us today