Involving Customers: Validation and Prototyping

Key Insight

After internal and external critical reviews, the process moves to directly involving customers to validate the new meaning. This step is placed later in the process to ensure that the proposed innovation is first deeply loved and robustly developed by the internal team. Customer criticism is then sought to ascertain if the vision resonates with them and how it can be made even more meaningful in their lives.

Traditional user research methods, such as surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic studies, are employed to analyze user needs, with the results often enhanced by collaborative reflection with interpreters. A more active validation approach, termed 'probing,' involves rapidly developing prototypes that embody the new meaning. These 'experience demonstrators,' like Philips' Ambient Experience for Healthcare probe, make radical shifts in meaning tangible, facilitating communication to stakeholders and collecting actionable feedback.

The most advanced and effective method involves deploying a 'minimal viable product' (MVP) to selected users for real-world interaction, learning, and iterative refinement. MVPs can be 'validating,' with lower performance to test if the core meaning is compelling despite limitations, or 'invalidating,' with higher performance to assess if appreciation stems from the direction or from over-delivery. This lean approach emphasizes that a robust initial vision is crucial for effectively interpreting customer feedback and driving rapid development.