Provotypes are an interesting – and extremely fun – way of making designs better by first making the most unusable or provocative versions of them. In this blog post, we explain how and why this technique offers much more than just good laughs.
Provotypes are an interesting – and extremely fun – way of making designs better by first making the most unusable or provocative versions of them. In this blog post, we explain how and why this technique offers much more than just good laughs.
Let’s face it: most likely, your test users are not designers. That is why asking concrete questions such as “what would you like to see here” work poorly in UX research, let alone in future-oriented concept analysis.
Regular Joes seldom use services with a designer hat on. Thus, without training or experience, it is often difficult for them to come up with ideas for new features or articulate why they like or don’t like certain aspects of the service. This is where provotypes can be of help.
No, that’s not a typo. Provotype is a design artifact – digital or physical – whose main goal is to provoke discussion among different types of users and stakeholders. Here’s the fun part: it is not supposed to be realistic, but ridiculous, funny, obscure, artistic – or even downright annoying instead.
Here’s the fun part: it is not supposed to be realistic, but ridiculous, funny, obscure, artistic – or even downright annoying instead.
Whereas classic prototypes are effective for solving well-defined problems, provotypes can be massively useful when we need to reach a little further in the future – or explore and break boundaries.
Provotypes are great in provoking discussion because they visualize and concretize ideas much further than spoken words or written descriptions. When we simply read about ideas, stories, and concepts, our minds start to visualize them according to our own experiences and expectations. Often those expectations are not met with reality, due to us having different backgrounds and visualization abilities. Using a provotype enables all stakeholders to have a discussion while having an overtly exaggerated (and sometimes hilarious) version of the product right in front of them. That’s how provotypes can be powerful tools for ideation and participatory innovation.
This May, we experimented with provotypes at the Shift Business Festival, where we held a workshop on understanding emotions in digital design and development. Since the workshop had no pre-registration, we had no idea how many and what kind of people would attend it. With this in mind, we wanted to create design tasks that a diverse group of people could discuss and work on together in groups.
When I suggested the idea of making provotypes to my fellow designers, they instantly liked the idea. We created a “medicinal Coca-cola bottle” that imagined what the packaging of the world’s most famous soft drink might look like now, had it retained its historical status as a medicine. Additionally, we designed a new, sillier version of the Finnish tax administration website.
Besides these concepts, we created tasks where the participants could explore various far-out design decisions within existing services, such as how to make the low-fare bus trip website, Onnibus.com, extremely difficult and annoying to use for colourblind people.Since the objective was to demonstrate how emotions affect the way digital services are designed and built, these non-functional designs worked really well as conversation openers.They enabled the participants to put a designer hat on for a moment – and have a good laugh while doing so.
In the case of the tax administration website, we allowed the participants to compare the original and the provotype, and then discuss which three elements they would change in the provotype in order to make it seem more trustworthy for the user. One participant felt that the font (in this case the infamous Comic Sans) distracted her too much. Another thought that the copy text itself was more important in conveying the message than the font. These are exactly the kind of problems we designers often have to tackle, when forced to prioritize work due to budget, while making the best possible decisions in terms of vision, schedule and the client.
The colourblind assignment, on the other hand, led the group working on it to google facts about the disability in question in order to make the prototype as terrible as possible. Not a bad outcome, considering that accessibility is such a timely and important topic in design right now. And of course, if you know how to make something really awful, you’re on your way to understanding how to make it good. One of the participants noted that she had never thought about designing websites from this angle: making a provocative version in order to avoid pitfalls in the actual version.
Provotypes do not work in every project, so you need to choose the context wisely. When you start making your own provotypes, whether it is for research or workshop facilitation, you might find these tips useful:
We would love to see what kind of provotypes you come up with – so tag us and let’s play together!
Stratos Innovation Group (2016) Moving from Prototyping to “Provotyping”.Method: PROTO- & PROVOTYPES.
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