How to Rapidly Design and Test Your Product Idea in 5 days

Welcome to the Discover program.

Throughout our experience helping some of Australia’s leading businesses develop product design strategies, we’ve seen many that fail and many that are successful. At the end of the day, the main difference is the thought process put in place throughout the product cycle.

Those who failed were the ones that compromised collective vision, choose to ignore the ‘unknowns’ and gets distracted out of their focus without even realising. The successful ones were those who were driven by the process and understands that the cycle is a continuous journey of learning, adapting and optimising – rather than a quest for perfection.

This comes down to how you set to start the project – the wrong way, where you jump into ‘production mode’ straight away while ignoring the potential ‘unknowns’ and not having a specific focus... Or the right way, where you define your specific focus and know what aspirations are you aiming for.

In this DISCOVER program, we give you insights on how to start the right way.

You’re now clear with your priorities... You’re clear with that one most important product you need in order to bring your idea to the market. It’s what we call the Minimum Viable Product.

In this lesson, you will learn on how to define the project's primary Goal in a single statement. You will also be guided on how to question that statement that it keeps you (or your team) grounded. This is another important anchor in your journey. One that you will look back to time and time again to make sure you’re being accountable and that you’re heading on the right path.

Having a focus is important. Actually, it’s critical...

Without focus, we can be taken to dark paths that leads to projects falling by the wayside. On this lesson, you will be guided on the process of reminding yourself as to which User Persona and User Journey are the most relevant to your immediate launch priority.

Having a focus on which type of User, within which part of their customer journey – is going to significantly drive your working effort on the right thing at the right time.

Now that you know what are the most immediate things to focus on, in this Lightning Demo lesson, we will guide you on how to use a technique so visual and so efficient, that you and you’re team will be able to take advantage of all the inspirations you’ve had collected so far.

This is an opportunity to look into other examples (relevant to your Focus), that can inspire or spark ideas for your own product that you’re about to design.

Welcome to the Design program!

As a principal of a digital design agency, over the years I’ve learnt to identify what the key essentials are in a creative design process, that it’s less about abstract art, but more about the art of creative management.

What do I mean by this? It’s simply about applying a practical design workflow, that it sits in the right intersection between business needs, technical needs and ultimately user needs. As a creative myself, I know how time-bound, business requirements can feel dry and demotivating…

But here’s a little secret – you can still produce kick-ass design work, while being super efficient and productive.

In this DESIGN program, I’ll walk you through how we manage to prototype Designs in a sprint, that you’re able to have a competitive edge in speed and flexibility. We’ll also go through how you can leverage your strengths and focus less on your weakness, without compromising the outcome of your Design process.

People often say “Design is a subjective thing”. I’m here to tell you that it's not necessarily right…

At its best form, Design can be the most methodical, collaborative and objective practice you've ever done.

So you’ve heard and seen many ideas so far. You know what the grand vision is and you can’t wait to design your own product. Here’s the trick, Don’t…

At least for now.

In this lesson, we will take a moment to analyse, process and take notes from the ideas we’ve seen or heard so far. We’ll also write our own version of ideas in a form of raw scribbles.

This one is about priming your design mindset. Let’s get on to it.

Have you ever thought about a design challenge so much that you’re experiencing the ‘creative block’?

In this lesson, we’re going to show you how to use the Crazy 8s brainstorming method. It’s strongest benefit is that it reduces or eliminates overthinking to unlock your subconscious mind.

If you don’t know this – your subconscious is a powerful, untapped tool.

This exercise is not to come up with a final solution or product. But it will give you better clarity, fresher perspectives and newer ideas. Just what you need at this stage in your project.

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for…

Yes, this is where you finally get to come up with refined visual ideas that would solve your project challenge.

In this lesson, we’ll guide you on how to visualise your thinking into clear and self-explanatory concept sketches. Don’t worry, it’s not about producing the most artistic sketch… It’s about producing 3 easy-to-understand steps, that are relevant to your Goal and Focus.

When you have multiple ideas, or even conflicting solutions from different team members – how do you decide on the best one to go with?

This is often tricky, because you don’t want to leave anyone behind or hurt anyone’s feelings. Or you might just be an indecisive person who can’t decide on which idea you should go for, so you can move forward with your project.

In this lesson, we’ll take you through a simple, objective process, on how to decide on a winning idea. It’s called the Silent Art Museum, and here’s how...

Now that you have a winning solution decided, you'll need to expand your visual ideas into a product storyboard. It's essentially a blueprint of your product user interface flow. There are many ways to do this, but we're here to show you a little 'hack' that will make this process a lot easier to do.

In this lesson, we'll teach you exactly how to do that – a trick called The User Test Flow – that will allow you to speed up your product storyboarding process.

What's the secret to an effective prototyping process? A good product storyboard.

In this lesson, we'll take you through the process of coming up with your product storyboard, in a form of a user interface flow. Leveraging the outcome of your "User Test Flow" from the previous lesson, we'll be creating a blueprint of your product that will ultimately help you map out all of the potential required interfaces, before jumping into the prototype itself.

This is one of the most important step in your design process. And we're here to help you get it right!

This is where your ideas are going to become even more real and tangible. Prototyping is about coming up with a façade of your visual ideas, that it looks real enough for your users to give you their honest feedback.

In this lesson, we'll briefly touch base on some of the most popular digital prototyping tools that you may want to consider... But most importantly, we'll talk about the mindset that you need to have while prototyping, as well as key things you need to watch out for... These are the principles that will make or break your prototyping process. Listen out.

In this lesson, we teach you on how to gather enough consistent feedback from your test users, so that you can be informed in making decisions for the business' next step actions. We will cover topics about how to recruit test users and also how to best run the user interview.

By the end of this lesson, you'll discover a simple principle that you can essentially use to run any type of user testing exercises. It's genuine, personal and insightful.

What's a user interview without any user feedback notes? Exactly...

And this is why we're going to teach you the important process of recording user feedback notes. While making sure that all user feedback are collected, this system will also allow you and your team to objectively review the user feedbacks so you can easily identify patters, that will ultimately contribute in your decision making process for the business.

Now let's focus on being a good listener and observer.

Wow. If you have got yourself to this point and have gone through all of the exercises to date – I'd like to take a moment to congratulate you. Well done! I'm sure you've done a lot up to this point. Hopefully the process had helped you break down the work from what initially felt overwhelming into feeling like this is all actually achievable.

Just remember that all you have to do is break down your work into manageable chunks, and do it. Stop overthinking, just show up and do it. Ultimately, you're doing yourself a favour simply by just moving forward...

So now it is time to review and prioritise actions. In this lesson, we will guide you through a process of identifying user feedback patterns, that you and your team will be able to come up with next step actions that will best suit your product or business. In addition to that, we will show you how to prioritise these group of actions, so you can decide on what's "High", "Medium" or "Low" priority.

At the end of this session, you'll be able to get an idea if you need to rethink your idea, or make some iterations or in best case – confidently move forward to production!

Good luck. And once again, well done!