Prototyping the Story
Designers like making models - “prototyping” - to judge aspects of a product they’re working on. At Continuum, we have a huge model shop, with several full-time model makers, and pretty much everyone in the company spends time down there at some point carving up a block of foam or hot-gluing some foamcore together to get a rough idea of what a product will actually be like.
But, of course, by the time we get into making a model, many decisions about a product have already been made - including, hopefully, its marketing story. (Not always, of course, but it’s pretty hard to design anything when there’s no marketing message in place to base the design on - how can you make something to convey a message when the message hasn’t been decided on?) But developing a marketing story is itself a design effort, so what’s the model-making equivalent?
One interesting method I’ve used, and seen used by others, is to model not the product but the box it comes in. Think of all the information conveyed in the box - the text tells the product’s story, the visual design conveys feeling, and the size and shape of the box itself speaks to the physical presence of the thing. It may be necessary to dream up an artist’s rendering of the product to put on the box, but even if you leave it out, but maybe not - in building product models it’s common to leave out many details to see how the rough outline hangs together for the consumer; the same can be true for the box model.
For one client I worked with, we were interested in understanding if it would make sense to include a new product in their line up - a high end but small-capacity unit. So we made simple boxes representing the packaging of the current line-up (small and cheap, large and medium-expensive, and large and expensive) and added a fourth: small and expensive. Prices were conveyed through price-tags attached to the boxes, which were appropriately sized but completely unmarked.
We brought in consumers, told them the category of product they were shopping for, and asked: what do you see on the shelf? Who would by these units? Which would you buy? Through this extremely simple mechanism, we determined that consumers did indeed understand what a high-end small-capacity product would be for, and who would buy it, and some of them though they might. All it took was a few square feet of cardboard and a brief discussion with a few consumers to show the idea was worth pursuing.
As you develop your product’s story, think about what it would mean to model not only the product, but the message. Don’t worry about conveying every detail - it’s the overall theme of the story that you’re trying to propose. The details are there to support the theme. If you find out the theme isn’t working without the details, that’s great - you just saved yourself piles of time and money developing those details. If it does work, great - you have a workable foundation on which to build.
Question for you: how would you test that your next product’s story makes sense, before you’ve built the product?
