Prototyping Experiences

Learning Objectives:

• Identify possible experience prototypes to resolve critical questions

When you have learned as much as possible from basic prototypes, you will progress to more advanced experiments. Especially when the innovation concept is a new service or strategy, you can use an experience prototype.

For example:

• The Frog Design team didn’t fully understand the user experience in extreme temperatures until they stood on a New York City sidewalk in winter.
• Bertucci’s explored how customers would experience their new restaurant concept by testing interactions in a warehouse.
• The full experience of the PlayPump could have been more thoroughly tested for additional users—particularly the women who might need to use it when children were absent or had lost interest.

An experience prototype is simply a more advanced experiment that tests critical questions related to the experience of the concept. For another example, let’s return to the successful online platform for lodging rentals, Airbnb.

Basic examples include:

• Will users book and pay online to sleep in someone else’s home?
• Will users feel safe and secure?
• Will hosts feel anxiety or excitement when guests arrive?

Imagine that you have come to a large city for a conference, but hotels are scarce and expensive. Would you pay to sleep on an air mattress in someone’s home?

Today, this happens frequently. But back in 2007, it was not common for travelers to stay in strangers’ homes. Figuring out how to overcome that unease was a critical question that Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky of Airbnb had to tackle before they could move ahead with their business idea.

For their first prototype, they set up a simple website advertising their San Francisco apartment as a place to stay during a big design conference being held in the area. That weekend, they had three guests pay $18 each to sleep on air mattresses in their home. At the time, average weekend hotel rates were $132 per person per night before taxes. So the prototype was significantly cheaper.

Their guests saved money and seemed perfectly comfortable with the unusual sleeping arrangements. In fact, the guests remained in contact with the hosts beyond their stay.

Through this experience prototype, the business partners discovered not only that there was a real market for their concept, but also that an air bed and breakfast stay was about more than just a place to sleep. They found that guests and hosts made personal connections fast, and that customers found it to be a unique and interesting experience, much different from the usual hotel stay for a conference.

Through their own experiences, the business partners soon discovered that an “Airbed & Breakfast” stay was about more than just a place to sleep. Brian Chesky described the lessons learned from the experience prototype as follows:

• “While these three people were living with us, we had realized that the normal arc of a friendship that takes years to build — now took a few days when people were living with you in your home.”
• “You normally don’t get to know people this quickly in the real world. . . One of the guests who stayed with us invited me to his wedding; one of the other ones changed his whole career trajectory because of that trip.”

During development and after two failed attempts, the Airbed & Breakfast website launched for a third time at another conference in 2008. The business model was still structured around conferences and required hosts to provide airbeds. Additionally, there was no payment system within the platform.

At this point, Airbed & Breakfast had answered critical questions around desirability using an experience prototype. While it is important to refine the desirability of a new innovation concept, testing all three categories (desirability, feasibility, and viability) is a productive approach.

The cofounders’ next prototypes addressed two critical questions regarding feasibility:

• Will users book outside of conferences?
• Will people use and trust an internal direct payment system that has two-directional reviews attached?

To test these questions, the founders posted listings for times and locations outside of conference periods. They also introduced their own direct payment system.

The results were clear: Customers were willing to book in situations other than conferences, and they were also comfortable using the internal payment system. In fact, customer feedback consistently revealed a desire to expand the service, and the company officially changed its name from “Airbed & Breakfast” to “Airbnb” to allow for expansion to other vacation rental options.

When Airbnb expanded to NYC, the founders noticed that many listings weren’t renting. The team reviewed these listings and found one common element: The pictures were poor in quality.

To test their critical question about listing photos, Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky rented a camera and went door to door taking professional quality photos of the New York listings. Once these newer and better photos were posted, bookings in the area increased by two to three times, and revenues doubled in less than a month.

Further research revealed that poor picture quality was behind slower growth in other cities as well. To resolve the issue, Airbnb contracted 20 professional photographers and offered their services to hosts. The service also helped the company vet rentals and verify addresses.

This is an excellent example of how prototypes can evolve as an innovation evolves. It is a large jump from making a simple website, to renting a camera and going door to door, to hiring professional photographers in cities across the country.

In each step, the critical question became more detailed, and the materials and funding involved increased. By the time they were investing in contract photographers, Airbnb’s founders were committed to the innovation concept. But they maintained the experimentation mindset that refines and iterates to increase the chance of success.

We discussed the four quadrants of the impact-difficulty matrix: Quick wins, Low ROI, High ROI, and Strategic. Most people would put the Airbnb concept in the Strategic quadrant. It has high impact, but is also difficult to implement.

We also discussed various approaches to moving an idea from the Strategic to the High ROI quadrant, using tools such as the closed-world principle and task unification. Prototyping is another important way to make this shift. For example, in the Airbnb case, prototyping and implementing the following features would reduce financial and other risks, and contribute to a less “difficult” concept:

• Bidirectional reviews and ratings on social media to reduce the anxiety of both customers and renters.
• Payment systems to reduce the risk of renters receiving cash and then backing out of the agreement, or customers not paying cash and cancelling a reservation at the last minute.

For bold strategic innovations, prototyping and experimentation are key elements of strategy. In the next article, we will see another example of how prototyping moved a bold innovation from the Strategic to the High ROI quadrant, as we discuss the Moderna Corporation’s development of the novel mRNA vaccine to combat COVID-19.