Experiment phase
In the Experiment phase, concepts begin to come to life. Through prototyping and testing, evaluate and reshape ideas before you implement solutions.
Outcomes
Test assumptions
Understand if you’re asking the right questions and solving the right problems by testing what you think you know.
Identify gaps
Gain an understanding of what you might have missed and potential areas where you can learn more.
Iterate and refine POV
Consider where to go next, whether it’s forward to plan for implementation or backward to do more discovery or strategizing to refine the point of view (POV).
Methods
Once you’ve narrowed down your concepts, the methods in this phase help you test their usability and functionality and whether they meet customer and organizational needs. During the Experiment phase, continue to research, build empathy for customers, and facilitate workshops and testing in order to develop the best solutions.
To test ideas, use prototyping — putting ideas into some kind of tangible forms to experiment with. You can prototype in many different ways, with many different levels of polish (called fidelity). A team’s skills, timelines, and needs all influence which type of prototyping method you should use.
In general, start with the least expensive and lowest fidelity — such as role-playing — and test early and often. Schedule a few rounds of testing to enable the refinement of your concept. Between rounds, reflect on and incorporate your learnings.
By the end of the Experiment phase, you should end up with a refined solution. Your experiments may also reveal that you need to revisit the research and problem space, refining the POV before you can refine the right solution.
Case study: Testing and gathering feedback
U.S. Air Force Weather Systems Office (WxPO)
While we haven’t yet reached this phase, we plan to test our assumptions and gather feedback as quickly and as often as possible to iterate and refine our solutions. Since our recommendations to WxPO focus on organizational changes, we’ll test prototypes within a smaller group to ensure their feasibility before scaling them to the larger organization.
Methods and other activities
Role-playing
To better understand how users in the WxPO would react, we leverage this simple method of prototyping to help us gain insight into how people would respond to our proposed solutions.
User flows
One of the solutions requires that we fully understand how users interact with a particular system. To quickly test our understanding of the process, we validate it by creating a user flow diagram that we test with the users.