HWS

ths.md

Notes for startup

Chapter 5: Prototyping

Fail early and often

Reasons for Prototyping

• The most important reason to prototype is fundamentally to learn.
• It’s important to learn from every prototype by defining a hypothesis, or something you expect to learn from each prototype.
• If you’re bringing a prototype to a VC partner meeting, don’t cut costs: get it from a nice model shop.

Benefit of low-resolution prototyping
Often, showing a raw version of a prototype or idea will garner rawer feedback from your users, more basic feedback about the product, including fundamental features.

Prototyping terms

• Proof of concept (POC): Used to prove out one tricky technical challenge and lower the risk of continuing development.
• Gestural prototype: A rough representation, usually used to explain a concept and garner feedback from users, meaning there is lots of hand-waving and saying things like “imagine if it did X” to visualize the device’s user experience.
• Breadboard prototype: A phrase often used by mechanical engineers to indicate a build that integrates subsystems.
• Scale models: Models smaller than the actual product can also be productive communication tools if the real product is too large to carry around with you to every meeting.

Works-like and Looks-Like prototypes

One common approach to this is the separation of works-like (WL) and looks-like (LL) prototypes.

• A WL prototype focuses on the core functionality of the product to make sure the technical challenges have been met and fundamental subsystems work before adding the burden of integration.
• An LL prototype focuses on the form, aesthetics, and design language, and potentially even touches on a product’s ergonomics to emphasize its look and feel, regardless of its internal functionality.

There are even more reasons to separate LL and WL prototypes during iterative prototyping cycles.

• From the design side, you can get user feedback on the form and feel of the product from users with an LL prototype, without the product necessarily working yet.
• Separate WL prototypes can help engineers solve smaller problems on a test bench before trying to integrate with a form factor or CMF (color, material, finish document) that adds additional constraints to the problem.
• Enable teams to work in parallel.

Teardowns

• Taking apart competitors’ products already on the market (commonly referred to as teardowns) can be helpful early in the prototyping process. (iFixit)
• Look out for: component selection, how each part was manufactured
• Don't simply copy the ideas

Assembling your team

It could be important to engage design services like branding, user experience, and industrial design if you need help crystallizing your vision and explaining the value proposition, but if your burden from investors or the market is to prove that your wacky idea will actually function, emphasizing mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or firmware engineering early on may be more important.