Code, Design, Designing Lean

Material Design for MVP

I’ve recently been building two prototype user interfaces, one for a mobile app the other a web-based dashboard. The mobile app prototype was built using a combination of Sketch and Apple’s Keynote presentation software. The dashboard had higher fidelity—a functional HTML/CSS/Javascript prototype interfacing with a light-weight JSON API.

I used this as an opportunity firstly to wrap my head around some of the design patterns for iOS 11, but also for trialling Google’s Material Design guidelines for this purpose.

There’s a lot to like about Material Design, especially for startups looking to develop a Minimum Viable Product. Continue reading

Business 2.0, Design

The new MBA: Mastering Business Ambiguity

Lisa Kay Solomon has a great post entitled The New MBA: A Masters in Business Ambiguity:

Long gone are the days of “Mastering Business ‘Administration.” (What are we administering anymore?) Today, the model we should be teaching is more appropriately titled: “Mastering Business Ambiguity.”

It’s a great piece—I’d recommend checking it out.

But it also sparked for me some thinking about the role that we (at Zumio, but also designers more generally) play, and I think that a critical part of our value to our clients is in working through ambiguity—the so-called fuzzy front end of business and product development.
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Someone using a mobile phone to take a photo Image: janitors @ Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/janitors/14368191486
Design, Presentations

Mobile diaries

This is a cross-posting of a post originally published on the IDX Backstage Blog.

It was prepared as a “leave behind” resource for participants at the 2014 Design for Social Innovation conference who attended the speed teaching session I hosted on mobile diaries.

In the spirit of Legible Practice I wanted to document in a bit more detail some of the aspects of what was discussed in those sessions. I hope this is a useful resource for participants and those who weren’t able to attend but are interested in the method. I’d be delighted to hear any feedback you might have…

Header image: janitors @ Flickr

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Business 2.0, NGOs & Nonprofits

Prototyping vs. piloting

This is a cross-posting of a post originally published on the IDX Backstage Blog.

In conversations talking about iterative approaches to projects I often make the distinction between a “pilot” and a “prototype”.

I can’t recall where I heard this, but I remember someone once saying that a “prototype” is as much about working out what doesn’t work (failing informatively, to borrow Clay Shirky’s phrase) as it is about working out what does work.

A prototype should be “light”—the minimum investment necessary to test something. It should be, conceptually, something that you’re not afraid to throw away.

The term “pilot”, on the other hand, infers something where there are a number of knowns and you’re really testing what it takes to actually run something—to take it to scale. There is a high expectation of the thing actually working. There may be more significant investment, just not to full scale. Often this may be the trigger for a summative evaluation (i.e. a stop-go decision)—making the stakes higher.

I’ve had occasion to revisit this thinking in the past few days. Both as we consider the first early prototypes of a series of workshop/event activities, and also in support of one of our Innovation Lab participants.

In the latter case, our participant is trying to understand how best to prototype an iPad app that will be used in a workshop context. There are a lot of mechanics to the workshop, and an underlying program logic (or theory of change) that needs to be tested, in addition to the app itself. So we’ve been exploring how paper prototyping tools might service the testing of this wider area of concern, before jumping too far into the development of the app.

At the same time, the IDX team has been exploring how coding and robotics workshops with primary school aged children could be of value in achieving our mission objectives. We’re looking into whether building on existing tools and approaches (MIT Scratch and FIRST LEGO League, for example) might work in our context. How we might need to adapt them. What level of interest might exist around these particular activities.

As a team we’ve been back-and-forthing about what “prototype” means in this scenario. Even running an initial workshop requires a degree of investment in hardware (computers, educational LEGO kits) that isn’t insignificant. What is the minimum investment needed, so that we can reduce the feeling that it must succeed (i.e. maintain space for informative failures).

I mapped this out on the back of a napkin this morning:

A rough mapping of prototyping through to delivery

We end up with three broad objectives for each phase: LEARN, PRACTICE, and EVOLVE. Of course, prototyping (and learning) can occur across the process, but as a broad mapping I found this useful to get an understanding in my head.

What do you think? Is this a useful distinction? Are there other definitions of these phases that provide a better understanding of when they apply?

Business 2.0, Design, Sustainability

3D printers and mass customisation

I had the opportunity to catch Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing on TED recently. It’s a terrific introduction to what 3D printing is and why it’s important, especially for the manufacturing sector.

In preparing for the Stepping up workshop one of the themes that emerged in our thinking was “mass customisation” (including its relationship to “authenticity” which also manifests in social media). Mass customisation refers to the ability of customers to selectively design the products they purchase. Lisa highlights how this can then be extended to allow customers to produce the products at home as well.

Products can be quite complex, as the AirBike demonstrates. And 3D printers are rapidly decreasing in cost, with basic DIY models like the MakiBox coming it at USD$350. That provides some indication of what Harouni is referring to when she says their affordable and crossing over.

In her TED talk, Lisa also explores how just product data can be shipped, instead of physical product, to deliver a product to a customer. She also outlines how distributed manufacturing might work, where a customer defines their requirements and the data is shipped to a local manufacturer for production and delivery (with the potential of significantly lowering carbon footprint).

This type of distributed model brings to mind RiverSimple, which is a new car concept based on the principles of the hyper car, introduced by the Rocky Mountains Institute and outlined in more depth in Natural Capitalism.

Part of RiverSimple’s vision is to distribute manufacturing to local hubs, rather than centralising manufacturing in one country, or distributing manufacturing across a global supply chain. (As an aside, I see this approach as having both parallels and coming into conflict with Porter and Kramer’s “industry cluster” principle for creating shared value. Perhaps for another post…)

I’m interested in seeing how technologies like 3D printing develop, enabling these kinds of decentralised manufacturing models and enabling companies like RiverSimple to fulfil their vision. It’s worth noting that 3D