 Daniela and Dennis Daniela, the vice-president of Dennis Daniela and I rather deal with their co-founders of the great 10 store, which is spin-off of the company Funhover Focus, right, yes. And the rest they will present by themselves, so let's hear from them. Thank you very much for being here, thank you very much for having us here. We are Daniela and Dennis, and you can guess who is pregnancy and who is storm. But today our talk is about prototyping and how it helps to make the innovation quicker and faster. So, a little bit about us. We are, spin-off of Funhover, Funhover is the biggest movement solution for applied research in Europe. We are having about 60 interviews from Biotech to Internet of Things, everything is there. And we created the spin-off to make innovation faster, not only for other companies, but also for other spin-offs of Funhover and Funhover itself. So, at the moment we are in a young company, we have been founded last year. We are having eight colleagues, Dennis and I were founders, but we have a big experience in years when we count all the years of our colleagues together. We have enough young colleagues and a lot of very experienced colleagues. So, we are not only a consulting company, we are also a development company. And what we are doing is developing digital products from the idea to the launch. And we are involved in our process of different experiences, like we are having IT and we are having business consulting in the company, but also design and psychology. So, this is our process, how do we work? And now I would like to switch to Dennis, we are switching back and forth, back and forth, and if you have questions, just stop us, give us a hand and we will answer the questions. Welcome everyone from here as well. This is actually our own process, but I would like to take a step back and explain a little bit why. Because you could say, okay, there is companies that have been doing products for the IG maybe 15 years, and why do we have to change it? When we look at it, the basic idea is first, we sit down, we think a lot, we think what the product will be that we develop, how it would look like, what the interaction would be. And then after we have finished the concept, the development of the product is being started. This has been proven a little bit difficult time and time again, because as I used to say, after half the project you have learned so much new information that you would like to throw everything away and start from scratch again. Because many assumptions that you made in the beginning turn out to be wrong or turn out to be slightly off. And in the end you end up with a product which is the thing that you have to make the concept for in the beginning, but it might not be what the customer really wants or it might not be the best possible product. In the new as well as in the old ways, you have these three phases, you have the ideation where you basically start throwing around ideas, where you are on a pretty empty canvas and you can do whatever you like. Then you start to go a little bit more in detail and as I said, develop the plan on what the end product will be and then there is the development process. Our approach is a little bit different as that we say we try to go back so that these boundaries, they are not hard boundaries, but we can move back and forth. Do you have a question? Yes. Why does the customer come to you in the first place? Or how do they typically come to you with something so open-ended? I mean are they saying come up with an idea on the product? I mean rather they must have a goal, right? Right, so people usually comment they have a sometimes more, sometimes less defined idea of what they want. And usually they are not very in depth, usually they come and say okay I want to have this or that problem solved. And this is where it really starts because sometimes they have a very, actually most of the time they have a rather vague idea of what they want, what problem they want to solve. They just have something that they see okay this is a problem, I want this to go away. But most of the time they don't have much more details on what they really want to do. So kind of what we do is in the concept phases we start to find out what is their problem? What is the problem that we have to solve? Where do we want to improve? Obviously usually there are internal problems like they need to improve a workflow or that they want to develop a product that they can sell and market. Sometimes we can be really concrete so we have for example currently we are working for a startup company. They have a software product that they want to launch by the end of the year. So they kind of did not have the development resources to develop this product on the road. So they were looking for an agency to do that for them. And they also did not have the experience that is something that we have been finding out all the time. Even with big corporations, for example Bayer, it's like one of the biggest medical corporations in the world. They are very good at making medical products but they are not so good at developing software. So they came to us and also to develop a certain piece of software to improve a certain process. And that was basically it. They did not know about what a product lifecycle is. They don't know how to roll out software to clients. They even don't know a lot about the software business models. So at the beginning they did not even know. They just knew they want to do something in this space because we have a strategic goal. But they did not know if they want to sell it, for what price they want to sell it, what the model is, is it more something that you rent or that you pay on a monthly basis or you want to pay a lump sum at the beginning. They did not even know how much of that product they want to sell. So this also sets the stage for they don't want to come up and say, here develop this product here is like, I don't know, say a number, half a million euros or 100,000 or 20,000, and develop something. Because the thing is they don't want to spend too much money and they want to have points where they can say, okay we go further or now the idea was not so good, let's drop it, we have spent a little bit of money that is okay, without them having to basically take the whole amount of money and plan it and then it's locked for the rest of the time and then in the end we have a product that no one needs. So that is basically the biggest pain of the customers that they don't want to go on an unknown journey. Risk. Risk, yes. So this is why we have these gates here and in the beginning there are a lot of ideas so we try to take the best of these ideas, work on them, then we have this first gate where we say, okay these ideas are worth exploring further until they are going to the next phase and then we do the same, we evaluate the ideas a little bit further, we create a small, high level concept for that, we do product types, this is what we're here about today and sometimes we also do the pitch coaching where we, because usually or sometimes there is an internal, how do you say, internal stakeholder who wants to be involved but he doesn't want to spend all the money on several ideas so they say, okay we have three teams, have the best ideas, after the pitch we will decide who is going to develop the MVP or the Sorda, so we want to see a pitch and we want to see a product type, otherwise it's stopped here. So here I have a second possibility where I can say, okay we're going further with this or now this is working out on, it's been a nice idea but in reality it doesn't come out. And then after the idea or the concept has passed this gate, we go to the real development phase and also this phase, it's not like you block this and there is no out, you can, I think you probably also heard about agile development it's from where you have also blocks which are fixed and defined, but outside of these blocks you are allowed to change the concept, bringing new ideas, refining ideas that we have worked on before and so on and so forth. So the whole idea is basically we have all the ideas and then we boil it down, boil it down, boil it down, boil it down until we arrive at the point where we have the best possible idea and the best possible product of course to go then public and sell it to the customers. I have a question. You basically described something similar to the U.S. Design Center. Where is the user research partners and how do you do or do you do any human research? How do you squeeze it into your space? I'll give you a question. The user research is the first phase in a design thinking phase where we are having the ideas and then we are trying to connect with users. We are not only having an idea like this, I think it's good for the user, but we are doing it in a way that we can go back and forth with prototyping here again. So first we have this idea, do you think, how do you think, what about it, is it your need, is it your pain? But we don't ask them, oh we have a beautiful idea, what do you think about it? But we ask them about the pain, the things they have if they need this product. So we are asking them, so what is most difficult part of your day doing this task? And they tell us what is the task and what are the difficulties. And then we understand probably more about the need than we assumed before. During the prototyping phase, so basically this is what I'm saying. So we usually call the concept or the concept that we call it a hypothesis. So this is something we think is the right solution to the problem. So what the next step is is we have to spend as little money as possible to make something where we can have the user either falsify or verify that we are on the right track or not. So the idea here is to make these prototypes as small as possible and as big as necessary. So we can say, okay this is going in the right direction, yes or no. I understand, but what type of methods do you use? Like, I don't know, personas? We will come back, we will come to this team in a deeper way of prototyping. We are using personas and we are using interviews in different ways. Part of it is out of the scope of this talk, but part of it I think we will go into more detail later on. So if you know about this startup, it's usually create, build, measure, learn. We adapted it a little bit to create, measure, innovate, because for us it's the learning also the innovation of the product. And how we do it, we have it, this is our concept through the whole cycle or the whole process. We are repeating and repeating it a hundred of times. So what are we doing to make it work, we are prototyping a lot. And this is, now I would like to talk about how we see prototyping. So we have some prototyping purposes. If you are been doing prototyping, some of you, of course. So there are different use on the prototype. Some people think the prototype has to be perfect to show it to the customer. And we are not thinking that it has to be perfect, it needs to be perfect. And also some people say, well, this is such a complex theme, we cannot prototype it. No, you can prototype everything any time you want. And also the third one is you need to do it and just keep iterating. So why prototyping? This is about risk as you told. It's all about the risk and minimizing the risk. If you have stopped prototyping here, you will have much higher risk of losing money. If you start prototyping here during your concept development. So start prototyping as soon as possible. And this is the risk minimization in the center of this. I've been working for about eight years and I see a lot of prototypes from research aspects. They have been perfectly built technology pieces. They have been working on a prototype for two years in a research project. And afterwards they came to the market and said, I have a beautiful prototype, let's bring it to the market. Very good, let's ask the customers what they think about it. Well, I'm difficult, you have to customize this type and this is not how I would like to see it. And then you understand, either you pump a lot of money to the marketing and communication to sell a product that people do not really want or you are going back in time and starting from the beginning. Then you lost a lot of money. And these are usually prototypes developed to validate technology because it's research. It's not about only the product, it's core research. And you're starting with a user test as a proof of concept in this type of prototypes. And the prototype is really high end, it's high-fidelity prototype. But the prototypes we are talking about are two-week prototypes. They're not two years for this prototype taken, only two weeks. They are developed to learn. And they are focusing on the customer type finds and how they will use it. And they are simple and cheap, even cracking. So here are some types of prototypes we are doing. We would like to introduce to all of them and we'll start the storyboard and drawing day. So usually we don't do storyboard and drawings for software prototypes. Usually you use it for hardware or real products which can be touched. So what are you doing? You are visualizing the process and who is involved, who is the persona. So we are using multiple personas for this roleplay. We are not familiar with the persona concept. You are trying to develop a product for a certain type of person. We are imagining she is a PR manager, she is doing climbing in her free time. And she likes to steal the climbing during free climbing. So we are developing a drone for this person who will fly around her and film her during the climbing. This is one persona, a drone. But the same drone would be just another persona who is an electricity park manager which has very high towers which are really difficult to overlook and to see if they are well or not. So the drone will fly up higher and to help the mechanic to fix them. Have some instruments. So we have two personas, same product. And we are trying to develop the storyboard for two personas. We are doing a roleplay like I am this PR manager and what I need during I climb with this drone. So it is written, it is scribbled, sometimes they are like a comic book. And sometimes you are doing it like a theater. Just to understand what are the steps to follow. Then what do you need? There are two systems of my children. You just need kind of paper and probably a word or some other program to write a text. This is my favorite prototype type. It is visit of all prototypes. I like it very much because it is creating an illusion of a real product without being real. So the main difference between this prototype and looks like this prototype is just seamless and automated system. An example would be you are developing an elevator. And this elevator has to have a video conversation for if you are stopped in an emergency. And you press the button and then video appears, operator talks to you and says, how are you, how many people are in the elevator. Does somebody has a private tag? So how to build a prototype in this case? It is quite difficult. You take cardboard, you build the elevator, you build this little window which would be the video. And then you build the button. Somebody goes in, pushes the button, the cardboard opens. Hello, can I help you? So why do you do it? It is not only because it is funny and nice. It is because you need it to understand what will be in the case we have this video thing inside and how it would be used. So it is creating an illusion of automated system. And then the people went in, pressed the button, the person opened it and said, hello, how are you, everything is good, everything is good. Okay, the mechanic will come in half an hour. And then, okay, what are you doing now? Close the window. They are again a lot and this thing was used only one second or two seconds. Like what is worse, being there for two seconds, you could also press the button. Or they are talking to people, they are coming uncomfortable to talk to a strange person or to a stranger. So what to do, they understand it is an uncomfortable situation. They need to put some videos on this thing. So they can watch some favorite videos from TV or YouTube or weather information or whatever to make them feel comfortable. Any questions? And the other one looks like it feels like. So here is not about the creating of simulation of the automated system, it is about making it practical, like how to fit that, like how it will feel this medical product that you are building for somebody, how they will use it, how they will touch it, how big it will be and things like that. Where the wires go, where is the battery, where is the weight. So you have something that you can really play with without having developed a view for that. So we are now moving more into the classical software development area, which is where I come from. So what we do in the beginning really is a paper prototype. A paper type means usually you print out on an A4 page these iPhone templates, which are basically just squares that have the same size as a mobile phone, and then you start to draw the interface on these screens. And you start to draw the whole story basically. You open the app, you have a loading screen, then you have maybe the first screen, you have the buttons there, and you basically create the whole process of the application on the paper. And this already gives you a lot of insight on how the final app will be used, will look like and what kind of problems you will face in the future when you further develop this product. So once you are happy with the paper process, this is also something that you can show the client. And I think we just make a little insert here. Talking to the client is always a difficult thing, because for example when we work with clients, it's usually they are very afraid to show it to a larger audience in an unfinished state. Because they say, how can we show this to the client? I don't understand, they will think we are spending their big money and we just scribble stuff on paper. But you have to be bold about it. You have to be certain about it and you have to go out and show it to them and get real users, people who are in the end buying your product to test it. Of course you cannot just show them and say, how do you think this is? Because they will always say, this is a great idea and I love it. We have to come up with questions that are not misleading but... They are not too uncomfortable telling you that it's not good what you are doing. So that is why we have a psychologist in our company, how to structure the customer interviews that way that it will be not confusing. That is one of the biggest problems, do you like this? Would you be comfortable with this? Yes of course, they always find something new. It's great and usually they may have a hard time understanding what the app is doing and then when you ask questions they usually they don't have much to say because it's just like five minutes after they saw it for the first time. So you have to pose the real questions or you have to pose the right questions so you will get answers that you can work on. Because if everyone just says, love it, it's a great product, I would try the other way around. We know there are problems with this product. We would like to ask you to find them, to tell us what to find them on. They go and deliberately try to find the faults and then sometimes they hate them. But they are from the beginning negative because you told them it's not good. So they are trying to find what's bad. It's the same measure. Better to show them how you use it. Exactly, so you have the first screen of the app and then you maybe have like three items to choose from. And then first before you show him the screen you tell the user, okay this is not that will help you do task A. So you just show him the first screen and then you ask him, what do you do? Will you swipe? Will you push the button? Will you go around? Or would you look at the menu? And so you are just looking what he's doing without asking. And then you understand what's the best way. And then you need not one customer, not one. You need a couple of them to understand what is the best way to do it. Some people say you need hundreds of interviews at least to verify or falsify. I don't think you need a hundred interviews at least. On a certain point you understand that there is no more additional information coming in after some point of interview. Might be five people. What we did with one project we did a math program for kids. So we went into schools, we had an iPad. We had them solve trigonomy questions. And it was all about what is the correct interface so they could take this line and align it at a 45 degree angle. So we had a little problem. This was a little bit in the step further. We were done in the paper prototype we stayed on. We already had a prototype. So we just watched what they do. If they were able to solve the problem and what they were trying to do. Where they're pressing on something and it did not work. And if they understand the icons and so on and so forth. So usually the best way is to take yourself back and just watch what they're doing. Once they have a clear idea of what the goal is. So we have jumped their head a little bit. Yes, so the tools, pen and paper, printed templates. Once you have the paper, pen and paper is in your head. This is it. We go to the next stage. Which is basically the same thing that we did before. But you're not doing the pen and paper. But you do it in a piece of software. And you mock it up with standard UI items. Standard user interface items. This also helps you get it in line with, for example, one of the usual problems you have at this stage is when you're developing for multiple mobile phone operating systems. The Android users have a different understanding of how an app works than iOS users have. And I think we all have seen this. This was something that started in 2013 where I am an iPhone and Apple user. And before basically the iOS apps have been transformed to Android because that was not the leading market and then that changed at a certain point. And now you saw all this Android user interface concepts come back or come to the iOS which was basically a problem because the iOS users didn't understand what this menu that came on from the side, came in from the side. It was not something that they learned that they were not comfortable with. But nevertheless this was put in because they had these systems which were multi-platform. You could just compile it once. You have to write it once, which was a big saving in money. But at a certain point they found out, OK, the people don't understand it because it's coming from a different world. And first they have to learn this Android user interface work before they can use the app which is basically something that kills the performance or the sales of your app because people are looking at you and say, OK, I don't understand. How can I perform my task? And it's deleted because usually you have about a couple of minutes user time. Maybe not even that website. They say you have about 10 seconds if the user is not getting his problem solved or he's not feeling he's on the right track. He will go back to Google, take the next page on the Google result list and then you basically have lost a customer. So yes, this is now a little bit geared towards mobile apps. So one tools I'm using, there are a couple of prototyping apps on the market which are very specific for prototyping. The one I like the most is Sketch, but there are others like Balsamink. You can also use standard drawing tools like Vizio or Omnigratl or people also use Photoshop, but I wouldn't suggest doing that because it's just like shooting with a cannon on a little hand or something. So after you are done with the Wi-Fi face, it's also something you can use to test here and you can refine your prototype even further. And once you're happy with what you have and the user understands it and you have a high satisfaction level, then you go to the next step. This is not really the next step, but usually you do that at about the same time where you decide to click for prototypes. Which is basically images and on each image you define areas that you can click on and if you click on this area, the next image comes up. This is a way where you can pretty inexpensively test the application because you can have mock-up data, you can have the whole flow of the application all the way there without having written once in a line of code. Do you put the graph design in the space to all of these? Yes, it depends on your customer. The project we're going to show afterwards, we really did a high-end version because the goal was basically to have a demo that can be shown to the board of directors of the company so they don't understand wireframes. They want to have a nice looking product. But in theory they would say never bother with high-end graphics. Take your mock-ups that you did in the previous step and just make them interactive. For this there are a lot of, just to know that I know, Envision is I think the market data there. There is Marvel which is basically the same. We used to use a product which was called prototype and paper or just paw which was a thing you could take your mobile phone, you can take a photo of the scribble wireframes you did in the first step and then you find areas that you can click on and just like this create the first click dummy of your app.