Test your innovation prototype and learn

- How do you know if your prototype is successful or not? You test it and learn. Test is testing to gain insight and improve. You're testing to see if you've actually solved the root cause of the problem. Back in diagnosed, we talked about what the root cause was for your problem. If you forget what that was, go back and look at your diagnosis statement, the why it is happening section. Yours prototype is supposed to solve the root cause, and if it doesn't, you'll need to reassess your solution. The way you test your prototype is by putting them in front of the target audience and getting their feedback. For this course, this is you. Here's how you start. First, download the prototype testing canvas worksheet. This will help you organize your thoughts. Use this canvas to prepare for your test and also record your findings. There's two sections to fill out. The first section is level setting your test expectations. It's important to define what your expectations are because if you don't do this, how will you know if the test of your prototype is successful? Answer the following five questions. First, what do you want to learn? Second, what are your hypotheses? Hypotheses are your educated guesses and things that are testable. Third, what are your expected outcomes? What do you think will happen? Fourth, what are your assumptions about your prototype? Assumptions are things you're believing to be true without any kind of proof? What are those? And finally, what does success look like for your prototype and this test? The second section is for recording your findings. During and post-test, there's two questions to fill out. First, what were the test results? You'll write down what happened here, and second, your key learnings. What did you learn about your prototype from your test? Write that here. Now that you're set up for your test, go ahead and test your prototype. When I created my garage door sensor prototype with my trusty toilet paper roll and zip tie, my goal was to see if that would stop the issue of my garage reversing when it was really sunny outside. So on a sunny day, I went out to my garage and installed my prototype and checked to see if it worked or not. And lo and behold, it did, well most of the time anyway. If you created a new process prototype, test the process and see what happens. Once you've conducted your test, fill out your prototype test canvas worksheet. Your next step is to gather feedback. One of my favorite ways to do this is using a technique called rose, bud, thorns. It's super easy to use. Roses are things you like about the prototype. Buds are areas of opportunity or growth, and thorns are the things you don't like. To do this, you'll need someone to test your prototype immediately after someone tests your prototype, have them write down the roses, buds, and thorns and collect their feedback. Now that you know how this works, here's what I want you to do to provide feedback on your own prototype. Write down your roses buds and thorns. What did you like? What were areas of opportunity or growth? What didn't you like? Once you've generated a list of feedback, it's time to move to the next step, iteration. In the last video, I said, your first prototype will never be your last. You'll be cycling back and forth between prototyping and testing. This is the process of iteration. Make a prototype, test it, gather feedback, make refinements to your prototype, and then test it again. You'll know when to stop. This is a cycle of learning, and it'll help you get your prototype to the point where it's ready to implement, which is the final stage in the innovation process.