Wow wow wow!
I just spent the weekend at the Harvard i-Lab / IDEO make-a-thon. What an awesome weekend. My team was Katini (Biology major from Kenya), Avinash (MBA from India), and Maja (Policy major from Croatia), and myself. We designed a micro-loan network for communities, focusing on students.
Before I get into the nitty gritty, here's the best hits list of things I learned, or had clarified/refreshed:
prototypes are meant to answer a question (how good a prototype is = (how much you can learn)/(how long it took you))
focusing on the end user can refocus what matters
think about the lifecycle of a product. Is your app used on the toilet, or right when someone wakes up?
Here's a breakdown of what you see above in the photos. For each prototype, we built the simplest thing we could manage to facilitate a discussion about assumptions.
Q: What should we make? Who is our user? A: A college student who has a cool opportunity for the summer, but they can't support it independently. We want to give her an experience that isn't embarrassing and feels more like a "compatibility network".
Q: Would people feel more comfortable putting their money towards a specific item, than contributing funds to a general plan? A: Yes! and people liked to express themselves through what they chose.
Q: How much value would a company assign to a social currency payment? A: Companies would want to know a lot of complex data about that person - let's simplify our revenue plan to just people paying back other people with money so we can prototype more.
Q: How do we display all the information to help people find each other? A: People want to sort it in all different kinds of ways, so it's important to make it easy for them to sort by multiple criteria.
Q: How could we onboard users in a fun, empowering way? (focusing back on the emotional value of our fabricated user). A: Birthday card is an interesting idea, but rather than giving the person money to invest on the platform, it would be more exciting to receive money that get's a campaign rolling.
Q: How does it feel when we make it real? A: People want to know about how to track reliability of users, and the lending side more.