PROTOTYPING GUIDE: CRAFTING LITTLE EXPERIMENTS

1. Identify your user. Think back to your empathy research and analysis.
Immigrant/minority students that are affected by the recent election and the new
executive orders and the white students that voted for Donald Trump.

2. Form your question. Your goal here is to learn as much as you can about your
solution idea by getting feedback on it from potential users.
1. How is the day to day activities affected for our both group of users by the
problem?
2. Would creating a safe public space for both groups be helpful?
3. What would be the one thing that unites college students?

2A. What are the ASSUMPTIONS you have about your idea? List them and circle the
most critical ones. Think about critical assumptions in this way--if any one of them
turned out to not be true, your solution idea as it exists would not work.
Many students are uncomfortable voicing their political opinions to others.
Students are more likely to share opinions in privacy.
Many students are facing backlash for political opinions different from others.
Students need a safe place to voice their opinions.

2B. What are the VARIABLES of your solution that you might experiment with to test
those assumptions?
Offering a reward to use the booth (e.g. food, entrance in a raffle, etc.)
Finding the most effective location on campus for the booth
Finding a good way to initiate use of the booth
Offering incentives during the debates (food, raffles, etc)
Getting approval to use a large room for the debates
Figuring out a great way to announce and invite people to the debates

3. Build to test. WIth your team, generate a list of questions you aim to answer by
building your prototype(s). If it helps, refer back to your storyboard and assumptions to
get inspiration about where your idea could fail.

Would the booth successfully help students voice their opinions without
the fear of being persecuted for their beliefs? - This would be tested by,
having a booth that is both anonymous in the voice recording or having a debate
where people can meet face to face.
Would having debates help students both explain their viewpoints and
understand the other partys viewpoints in a positive atmosphere?
- During the debate after talking about their preferred side, both groups would
have to switch to their opposing sides and talk only positive things about it
Whats more important to our users: being able to express themselves
about the subject, having people to talk to that they can relate to better, or
being able to understand the different points of views that everyone has?
- We will be able to see this by the way things turn out during the debates and
booth experiments.
4. Visualize Your Test. Draft an eight-page storyboard (think about a comic book or
graphic novel here) that shows how your team would carry out test. What key things
would happen in the beginning, middle, and end of the test? Who (host, user, notetaker,
active observer) would be doing what at each stage?