Another short blog about tools we use.
Photo-prototyping can be a quick and effective way to visualize a concept!
Pictures enable discussions about something more tangible than an idea in your head or sketched on a napkin.

As a part of a new service; an iPhone app sketched & prototyped. (Starring Anne Marleens finger)


Example 1: possible flow diagram

‘Stairs-help” prototyped (Starring Annemiek, Olympic rower & still perfectly capable of handling stairs on her own btw.)

Example 2: Another storyboard example showing different stages

Railway platform games (including Olympic Winter Games)

Example 3: Sketches can be added easily

Photo prototyping works:

1. if you keep it quick & dirty
2. if you print them directly
3. if you put people on it; human scale
4. as an effective discussion tool
5. if you take more pictures to make a storyboard
6. because sketches can be added in a context

Take care:

1. make sure to keep it conceptual; (not too definitive already to prevent constricting more creative thinking or promising too much)
2. always have a camera, plug & printer with you ;-)

What we did

We made a diary with 7 themes which we sent to 18 participants all over the country.
Time could be saved by not personally bringing the packages (and after some time visiting participants again for analyzing), as we normally do.
Instead we made a short instruction video for each day, or theme, which we posted on our website. The URLs were printed on the corresponding page in the diary.

After 2 weeks, we organized a co-creation session for 12 of the 18 participants.
The first ‘warming up’ task in this session was taking in and analyzing all the diaries together.
This was found quite difficult for most of the participants, although it helped them to see how the others practice their hobby.

The rest of the session went pretty well; the participants initialized a lot of new wishes, ideas and concepts for ‘P&M’.
For our own learning we evaluated the project and the methods used after the session.

Lessons learned

• Just sending the probes and links for explanation videos did save us quite some time in the project.
• Next time, communication about the videos should be better; not many participants watched them.
  Positive: because the purpose and themes of the diary were quite clear, no extra instructions were needed.
  Could be better: the URL was not often recognized as ‘help’ and not quite eye-catching on the hardware, colorful page.
• The persons who did watch the videos described them as instructive and understandable.
• For this project, the videos saved us some time because we made them ‘quick and dirty’, but making serious, instructive, professional videos can take a lot of time as well.
• Analyzing the probes together with this group of inexperienced participants probably needs more guidance and strict small tasks than we provided.

Still, I think visiting people is very valuable and useful for several reasons, for instance;

• for the participant it is a gesture of real attention and reassures the value of his participation
• the researcher can explain the probes and answer questions directly.
• to see the participant’s ‘natural habitat’ can help to form a better understanding of his context
• after some time analyzing the rich materials of personalized probes together with the participant provides a much better understanding
• and of course it is interesting and fun for the researcher to see new people and places!