In this day and age, many companies are taking advantage of the opportunity to use rapid prototyping companies and freelance CAD designers because of their availability, cost efficiency, and productivity.
thingyfy Product Page
For many companies, it is inefficient to do the work of designing a new product, creating a prototype, and then performing all the necessary subsequent testing in-house. Any company can reach out and acquire the services of any number of freelance designers, rapid prototyping services, and small-batch manufacturers.
With the variability inherent in a process like this, it is necessary to find the best designers and producers in the market so that you can create the best possible product. Now, as a manufacturer or product designer yourself, you may think that it’s unnecessary to hire an outside designer or company to create a prototype for you, and if that’s your final decision, that’s quite alright. However, there are numerous benefits to using freelance product designers, as well as outsourcing your prototyping to other companies, and some very well-respected companies have seen the benefit to these options as well.
For instance, Fender Musical Instruments has turned to rapid prototype design when working on new product development. Fender, a leader in musical innovation and technology, has worked with musicians like Eric Clapton and John Mayer, designing and selling some of the most recognizable guitars, basses, and amplifiers on the planet. They are well known for creating unique and innovative designs in their instruments, being the company that revolutionized the electric guitar for the general population. Now, they’re using rapid prototyping, freelance design, and 3D printing to come up with their innovative styles and groundbreaking looks.
If freelance design and rapid prototyping are good enough for these companies, it can be a great benefit to yours as well. But before entering into any sort of contract with a company to do this sort of work, it’s best to ensure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Knowing all of your options and being able to ask the right questions going in will help you make educated decisions and create the best part. Here are ten things to know when working with a freelance designer or rapid prototyping company.
There is so much more to rapid prototyping than 3D printing. When you want to create a product, no matter what it is, companies that perform rapid prototyping and small-batch manufacturing can produce anything you want in a matter of several hours. Obviously, 3D printing is an important prototype tool because of its ease of use and its widespread availability, but there is much more to it.
With the incorporation of CNC machines and lathing techniques, you can create rapid prototypes with any material, from wood and metal to plastic, and now, even in some cases, fabrics. The rapid prototyping process has expanded to include techniques that will print or weave textiles rapidly from raw materials, creating immediate samples of clothing in hours without having to set up the machinery that is necessary for the manufacturing process – which is vast.
But in addition to this wide variety, prototyping companies themselves have small systems to produce some of the integrated products you need, which can be far more complex than a simple shaped part or article of clothing. No, a rapid prototyping company can design integrated circuit boards, create complex machinery, and even produce fixtures and dyes so that you can continue to manufacture your part continuously in the future.
We trap ourselves in a box when we fail to mention the other possibilities rapid prototyping opens up for us because there is a vast array of options available. In fact, some models of GE Jet engines were created through rapid prototyping, which demonstrates the vast complexity that can be created with these processes.
They underwent testing and were installed on demonstration prototypes and succeeded in every way, leading to incredible jet engine performance that is now available on modern airliners. A number of Nike products have been designed using rapid prototyping, and there are even jewelry manufacturers that use rapid prototyping to design and create their products.
If you don’t feel like you need to fully commit to using a rapid prototyping company or a 3D printing company, you may want to reach out for other options. Some companies offer product consulting expertise, which can be immensely valuable.
Product consulting is essentially prototyping and freelance design… without the design. When you need to discuss market analysis and competitive products, maybe perform some benchmark testing or product breakdowns, product consulting can come in handy. These freelance product design experts, many of whom have spent years working on similar products to the ones you need to make, can help you ideate and understand the needs of your customer and how to best achieve your results with your product.
You don’t necessarily always need the designer to come to you with a fully designed blueprint in hand, much less a working model of your product. Sometimes you just want to know the best way to do something or to be able to ask if your initial ideas will even work.
Companies like DEKA and Ideo, who make it seem like four-letter nonsense names are a prerequisite in this industry, specialize in product consulting. In fact, they’re the great minds behind the Segway, the Coca-Cola Freestyle (those machines in restaurants with roughly three hundred thousand different soda options), and the two-tiered shopping carts that have been invading grocery stores for the past few decades.
They take your problem with a product and stick it in a closed room with a dozen brilliant engineers and market researchers, throw in some coffee, and lock the door, opening it a while later to see what comes out. This has, obviously, led to some incredibly marketable and successful ideas, and it could be another avenue for your company to pursue.
Take it one step further than we just mentioned. What if you want a design but don’t necessarily need a prototype? You can create a virtual prototype. 3D design services can create product design and sketch up concept models for you. Beyond that, however, they can make your product design realistic and lifelike, with the ability to run it through a number of tests. Programs like SolidWorks and Creo have incorporated new functionality that allows you to assign properties to components you have created and use those properties to perform product testing without having to actually manufacture the part.
Obviously, there are considerations when doing this sort of design and testing. You won’t be able to perfectly simulate the real world, as our technology hasn’t arrived at that point yet. Maybe in 20 years, virtual reality and augmented reality will have created a simulation universe where companies can run rigorous testing that perfectly captures the properties of the real world, but currently, there are limitations.
However, this can still give you opportunities to test products in a safe and cost-effective environment, without consuming the time to manufacture it. It also gives you the opportunity to redesign and retest immediately, because everything is virtual.
In the end, this option, especially compared with the product consulting option mentioned above, simply comes down to your company’s needs and its constraints. Be sure to have a frank and open discussion about what you’re looking for in a product design or rapid prototyping contract before you get started. In fact, discussing these options openly with the company or contractors with which you are working may open up a new world of possibilities that we haven’t even addressed here.
What’s the next step after creating a prototype? Well, there’s rigorous testing and numerous rounds of trials that need to occur before you can properly market and sell real products. After the preliminary testing is complete and you have a product you want to sell to consumers, you’ll have to get it out there so the customer can test it and run some Beta testing. This will give you an idea of what works and doesn’t work with your product as well as how well it can sell to certain market segments and geographic reasons.
There are many reasons you may not want to produce the products for the Beta testing in your own facility. It’s possible you’re still not certain the product will sell well enough to be worth it. Or, potentially, you may not be ready for the machine requirements it will take to mass produce this item, either because you’re waiting for capital, equipment space, or some other reason.
Whatever the cause, you can choose to create small (relatively speaking) quantities of the product from an outside source, so that you won’t have to worry about the logistics and commitment prior to launching the product. You always want to make sure your product will fly before you commit to buying that new million-dollar machine to produce it.
Small-batch manufacturing is a growing trend that sees small companies partner with large manufacturers so they can produce limited quantities of products, either newly developed goods to test with consumers, or a limited run of a product for some other reason. Whatever the need, small-batch manufacturing is an excellent option.
This way, you can get the product designed, tested, and sent out to consumers for verifying and market analysis without having to make the massive in-house expenditures or committing the extra time to create it yourself. By this point, you will have a full-fledged product that is consumer tested waiting for you to commit to or redesign, without having to lift a finger.
You may think that prototyping, small-batch manufacturing, and freelance designing can be somewhat crude and rough in their final productions. However, this is no longer the case. With the wealth of technology available to businesses nowadays, companies of any size can create high-fidelity prototypes, which are sleek, elegant products with little investment and time spent.
For a good example of this, I’ll show you a company that has worked backwards when compared with the typical avenue of prototyping businesses. The company Quirky essentially outsources the ideation and product consulting to everyone. Quirky takes submissions of various product ideas – any product ideas.
From products that act as flexible, breathable covers for an AC unit to prevent leaves from clogging them up to a dog water fountain so you don’t have to leave a bowl out, Quirky accepts submissions and decides if they think the product is marketable. If so, it will send it through to a group of designers and mechanical engineer services who come up with the best design and solution for the issue raised. They discuss the product in detail and, after selecting several to work on every month, they create a prototype, and eventually sell it to outside manufacturing companies who sell directly to the consumer.
Of particular interest is their pinnacle of design, their most prominent product – Pivot Power. You may have seen this in Target or Bed Bath & Beyond, the Pivot Power is one of those shockingly simple product ideas that makes you say, “I could have done that myself!” and invariably makes someone else sarcastically respond “but, you didn’t.” It is a power strip with a joint next to each socket, allowing the device to pivot around corners, and even coil into a snakelike shape.
It has branched off into more dynamic and sturdy versions that can even coil around table legs to offer three dimensions of power access. And the product work is impeccable. It is a sleek, appealing product that entices consumers to purchase it. A prototyping company can offer you this sort of finished product – one that is elegant and impactful.
Another thing to consider when you are working with these companies is to verify everything. As they are outside contractors, you need to ensure that your intellectual property is secure with them and that you will have no qualms about ownership. You also need to verify their credentials to ensure that they can complete the work they are promising you.
Fortunately, resources like Cad Crowd can help you with those very things. All of the contractors who agree to work with Cad Crowd are vetted and verified, ensuring that their credentials are legitimate and they are capable workers. In many cases, the individuals are members of prestigious organizations or employment boards which proves their skill and credibility, giving you an added layer of security and stability.
Additionally, Cad Crowd ensures that your intellectual property is safeguarded for every eventuality because their goal is to protect you as their client. There are numerous stories about people on both sides of the equation getting duped and tricked out of either their intellectual property or their money after a deal went sour.
The university from which I graduated had a story just like this about a student who contributed an architecture assignment for a senior design project in the s about the design of a new football stadium. The next year, a similar design was presented and won an award, eventually leading to sponsorship and construction on a football stadium that stands to this day.
The lead architect and designer on that project was the student’s Civil Engineering professor, to whom he handed the paper. Obviously, stories like this are anecdotal and hard to trace back to their roots, but there are too many of them for them all to be fabrications. It’s best to ensure that you and your intellectual property are safe and secure.
How “rapid” is rapid prototyping? How much time can you save? I guess the better question is, how much time do you need? When a rapid prototype takes on your project, and you leave the office, only to return the next morning with a package on your desk filled with a finished project, you’re going to need some ideas to pass the rest of the time allotted to your project. Might I suggest learning a new design software, since you will probably just have learned how useful it can be?
In reality, you likely won’t get a package back that quickly, but it’s probably more because of the speed at which mail delivery occurs than the rapidity of the prototyping process. On average, a 3D printer can produce a part or component in minutes and can create a finished, small scale product in several hours. The typical time to get a completed project back from a rapid prototyping company is several weeks, and that involves receipt of the necessary information, product design, prototyping, and preliminary testing.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website Rapid Prototyping in the Automotive Industry.
At IMTS, the International Manufacturing Trade Show in Chicago in , a company came with a booth set up to show the technological capabilities of rapid prototyping and 3D printing, especially in regard to the automotive industry. To prove their point, they set up a large-scale 3D printer, roughly ten feet by twelve feet, in their booth, and 3D printed every single component of a working car and assembled it by the end of the trade show. After the seven-day trade show ended, the employees at the booth got into the completed car, turned a key, and drove out of the event center. That kind of speed is what your company will gain access to when it works with a rapid prototyping or freelance designing company.
Packaging is probably one of the most underrated aspects of design. In fact, I have met and worked with people who had exclusively studied packaging design and created a successful career out of it. One of those individuals was the highest paid, non-managerial engineer in a company of 120,000 global employees, so it’s safe to say it is a very valuable aspect of design.
One of the other packaging engineers I have encountered worked as a contractor with a small, relatively unknown company at the time, interested in portable drink mixes. As a freelance 3D modeling designer, she helped create a package that acts as a single-serve beverage mix container that can be easily stored and remains shelf-stable. That company, then relatively unknown, was called Crystal Light, and its packaging is what launched their company into becoming a nationally recognized brand. Packaging design is, needless to say, extremely vital for a product.
When you create your product, you will likely need to create some sort of packaging. Who better to work with the packaging than a freelance designer? If you choose, the same freelance designer or design company that created the initial prototype could help create the packaging, as they would have intimate working knowledge with the product and could help you create a package that effectively serves as marketing in addition to a container for the product.
Or, you could choose to go the route of just using a freelance designer for the packaging, so that you can avoid the stress and time-consuming process of designing something that doesn’t seem as value-added as the product itself. Regardless, whatever your choice, a freelance design service can help you come up with effective packaging that meets the needs of your product and company.
We have run through the entire process of talking about, designing, making, testing, and packaging your device. But we may have left out one crucial piece of the puzzle. You need a patent, or in many cases, simply a trademark, to ensure that your intellectual property remains safe and you can reap the rewards of your product.
Before selling your product on the marketplace, you need to verify that a patent or trademark for this product is available. If this is a brand-new type of product, you can get a patent that will ensure the intellectual property and design elements remain secure in your name for the duration of the patent.
If it’s simply a novel product idea that doesn’t necessarily require patenting, a trademark can help you avoid legal complications and ensure that your product doesn’t get stolen. However, before you start selling, you need to ensure that you don’t infringe any patents or trademarks yourself, because that can cause you all kinds of legal headaches, and, at the very least, cause you to have to redesign your product. At worst, it could include jail time and hefty legal fees, but neither of these options is desirable for your company.
When you work with a freelance design service, you have the option of finding one that can do deep, intense patent and trademark searches. They can remove all the stress from your shoulders when it comes to clarifying any legal issues. In fact, if you give them the information and let them know beforehand that they need to search for patents and trademarks, they could even create a design that is intended to avoid the patents they have found, or adjust it so that you could patent the design yourself. Either way, a competent, qualified freelance design company can save you much legal headache and can give your business some valuable opportunities for intellectual property going forward.
Have I sold you enough yet on the value of rapid prototyping with a freelance designer? Because everything I’ve mentioned before should be fairly convincing. However, if it’s not, there’s still another benefit. It’s always free to ask. There is literally no harm if you ask about a company’s services and what they can offer you.
In fact, you can get a quote so that you can compare the cost of their services not only with other similar designers and companies but also with your own in-house methods. Many times, if not all, you will find that freelance designing and rapid prototyping is more cost-efficient methods that will save your company time and money in the long run.
The best way to choose the right designer is to use Cad Crowd to secure a highly qualified individual who can create the best product imaginable and protect your rights and intellectual property. These contractors will be able to design, test, prototype, and manufacture a product that meets all the needs of your large or growing business. Just give them the keys and let them drive a new design because your hands will be off the steering wheel with such a dynamic team at your fingertips. You can give them the requirements, discuss with them to see what the market demands and let them create. You may have to supply extra coffee at times, but that seems a small price to pay for the myriad of incredible services these freelancers can offer you.
Whether you need to simply talk with a rapid prototyping company to do some product consulting because you’re not sure exactly what you want out of your product yet, you want to create a virtual product design to run through a litany of imaginative tests, or you want a full-fledged product sitting on your desk next week, find a qualified 3D designer and prototyping expert.
You can get quotes and compare, like a shopping list for the product of your company’s future, and, more often than not, you’ll find the best option is outside of your company’s walls. Hopefully, next time you want to create a new product, you will step out of your comfort zone and, using the advice laid out here, find a freelancer who can make your dreams come true with a brand new product designed and tested, just for you.
Rapid prototyping allows a startup to test various versions or models of its idea in short iteration cycles.
The intent of rapid prototyping is to learn from each iteration and avoid expensive mistakes that can result from untested assumptions.
There are three main categories for rapid prototyping, and each category represents an essential question critical to success. First, does anyone want what you plan to do? Second, how will they interact with it? Finally, will it achieve a meaningful impact, moving the needle that customers want to see move?
These three key questions map to three types of strategies: vapor tests, fake front-ends, and fake back-ends.
In this chapter, we explore several strategies that can be used to implement rapid prototyping. These techniques can help propel an idea through the cycle of testing a completed product, learning from the results, and iterating. While these rapid prototyping ideas are most relevant for digital health technologies that lend themselves to short iteration cycles, variations on these themes can also be used with new healthcare services and medical devices, especially in the early stages of development or in preclinical testing.
Rapid prototyping, also known as rapid validation when approached intentionally with explicit hypotheses, refers to the process of testing an idea as quickly and inexpensively as possible. The core concept is that it is preferable to find out early and at low cost that the team is heading in the wrong direction, rather than failing after already investing time and money into perfecting an undesirable product or service (see the chapter “Identifying Unmet Needs: Problems That Need Solutions”). When leading innovators say, “create a culture that embraces and celebrates failure,” what they really mean is to embrace fast, cheap failures methodically guided by intentional experimentation. Well-constructed hypotheses, ordered by what is most critical to success and least known or understood, identify the big assumptions that must be true in order to achieve a desired outcome. Experiments, dramatically accelerated by the methods we will discuss in this chapter, can then be designed and implemented to test whether one is heading in the right direction. This way, learning what does or does not work in days or weeks instead of months or years is efficient hypothesis invalidation rather than failure. By testing an idea as quickly and as cheaply as possible, the team will gain insights on how to improve the idea, and they will have more time and resources left to make necessary improvements based on believable evidence generated in a realistic context. Even if an idea is unpolished or underdeveloped, rapid prototyping can be used early in the process to determine what aspects of the product work, what assumptions about the product hold up, and what consumer interest in the product exists (see the chapter “Conducting Insightful Market Research”). This process is advantageous compared to testing a product after a large amount of time and money have been spent, as it may turn out there is no consumer demand or interest for the product, and all that time and money have been wasted. Validated data from the fast, cheap tests of rapid prototyping provide knowledge a team can use to reassess and build a product better suited for their desired end goal (Graham; Ries; "Pretotyping.org").
A quick internet search for “rapid validation” yields hundreds of different techniques, which all appear to be completely different—there are A/B tests, the Wizard of Oz experiment, crowdfunding, the concierge minimum viable product (MVP), landing pages, paper prototypes, or digital prototypes, just to name a few (Bank). However, we believe that at their core all these techniques can be categorized into three main buckets: the vapor test, the fake front-end, and the fake back-end (Figure 1). In order, these test whether anyone wants what the entrepreneur plans to build, how people will use it, and whether it achieves the desired results.
The vapor test, also known as contextual demand testing or smoke testing, generates and disseminates a perceived existence of a product in order to test contextually whether or not consumers would be interested if the product actually existed. Asking people what they will do generates false signals; what people say they will do (e.g., buy a product) is fundamentally different from what they actually do, and the vapor test recognizes this discrepancy. Skilled researchers often say one must be careful to observable behavior instead of stated behavior. Stated behavior is what a prospective customer says they want or need, or it expresses the action they would theoretically take. Traditional research, including surveys, focus groups and interviews, falls into the trap of capturing this stated behavior (see the chapter “Human-Centered Design: Understanding Customers’ Needs through Discovery and Interviewing”). Prospective customers tend not to say what would accurately predict demand; this could be because people want to tell you what they think you want to hear, or they describe the way things are supposed to work instead of how they actually do work (e.g., men rarely tell you cutting their face with a razor is part of their shaving process), or they cannot imagine what they would actually do when presented with a new opportunity. For example, before investing in designing, building, and distributing a new product, a company might create a realistic digital representation of a product on an e-commerce site; should a prospective customer place the item in their shopping cart, the company might display an “out of stock” message as a soft landing. Prospective customers attempting to buy in a realistic context represents observable behavior and a strong signal of demand. This contextual demand testing works for new services as well. Leveraging a concept like a private beta, a company can describe a new service and add a button for signing up. Clicking the button may direct users to a page notifying them that the service is in a private beta-testing mode and is not accepting new clients at this time, possibly with the option to sign up for the waiting list. While in some cases a private beta may simply mean that there are enough people already testing the product or service, in other cases it might mean the service or product does not yet exist; however, people signing up provides clear, observable behavior revealing demand. In the context of adding new features or functionality, or considering whether to build a new online service, this approach is sometimes referred to as a fake door approach, as named by Jess Lee, cofounder and CEO of Polyvore. Before investing the time to build a new feature, a site might add a link to the proposed functionality. Upon clicking and walking through that “fake door,” a user might see a message that it is under construction, as it does not yet exist. Yet the company now has a sense of interest. If there is limited interest below a cost-effective threshold, the company can decide not to move forward with creating this feature and save both time and money. This technique is best utilized when one wants to test whether or not demand for a novel product or service concept exists.
Indiegogo and Kickstarter are fully transparent versions of this concept, where one can test contextual demand by asking people to translate interest into an action like pulling out their credit card to reserve a product. In these cases, the products clearly do not yet exist, but the prospective customer’s action of joining the campaign to get it built becomes believable, realistic evidence of an unmet need.
Sometimes the biggest unknown yet critical assumption is what a prospective user would do with a new product or service. The fake front-end, also known as contextual interaction testing, is used to test how someone will interact with an innovation that has been imagined and planned. A classic example, told by Alberto Savoia in his Pretotyping Manifesto, describes Jeff Hawkins’s prototype of the PalmPilot (“Pretotyping.org”). To test not only whether he might actually use a mobile device, but also how to design such a device so that it would be most useful in solving real needs that emerged in daily life, Hawkins fashioned a fake version of the device. This version was a block of wood roughly the size and shape of what would become the PalmPilot, with a simulated interface and a stylus also fashioned out of wood. What might one learn by carrying a block of wood around in their pocket? First, whether a user ever took it out of their pocket and wished it were real. Second, how to build it to most efficiently address the reason a user took it out of their pocket. If Hawkins wanted to look up a number or record an appointment, he would take out the woodblock as if it were a real, functioning mobile device and walk through the workflow using his imaginary product. From this exercise, he learned what features he found most useful and what designs would minimize effort while delivering the desired benefit, and he avoided investing time and money in building elements that failed to address contextual needs.
In the healthcare field, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) recently executed an exemplary fake front-end using this rapid validation approach. They examined whether certain children with sickle cell anemia (SCA) who presented at the hospital with fever could be sent home instead of hospitalized. Historically, children with SCA who presented to the hospital with an elevated temperature were admitted to the hospital due to concerns including the risk of a serious bacterial infection (SBI). Some clinicians believed they could set criteria—proposing a potential algorithm—that would identify which children could safely be sent home instead of being admitted into the hospital. How were they able to safely separate the two groups, and, just as importantly, build support and buy-in while appropriately managing risks to move this potential breakthrough in care forward? Those at CHOP who believed they could identify which children could safely be sent home created a fake front-end algorithm using the criteria they believed would do the sorting. They began to assess patients with SCA who showed up to the hospital. Applying the proposed criteria, they determined whether to admit the child or not. But it was just a fake front-end, so, just like the block of wood, it didn’t change what actually happened in the real world. All children were still admitted, but now there was an explicit record of who was identified as safe to send home, and the team could follow up to see whether it was the right decision or not. The system notified the Hematology Department about all low-risk SCA patients prior to their discharge from the emergency department in order to ensure follow-up within 24 hours. They were then able to inexpensively and safely evaluate whether this basic system accurately identified the low-risk SCA patients. Insights based on this simulation enabled iterations that refined the algorithm. Once they generated evidence that the system worked effectively as planned, they were then able to deploy a live version and make real decisions that prevented unnecessary admissions to the hospital. This approach saved the team from implementing an expensive or complex clinical workflow, launching a risky or misguided solution, or remaining stuck in old workflows. Today, more than a third of patients are sent directly home, avoiding expensive, inconvenient hospitalizations that could result in iatrogenic complications.
A final essential question is whether the proposed solution achieves a materially better outcome. In this case, unlike a fake front-end, it actually needs to do something. Fake back-ends provide the mechanism for building something that actually works while staying true to the mantra of testing quickly at low cost. A central tenet of this method is avoiding the notion of building for scale (i.e., producing a solution that can handle high volumes and large populations) right out of the gate. Sometimes this is described as handcrafting an experience or building a “product” held together by tape, paper clips, and chewing gum that might work for three customers over two days but that could never scale, as it would fall apart under higher volume. This method shifts the focus from scale—usually a premature concern that could lead to scaling the wrong product—to getting it right and then scaling what works.
Some of the most successful startups in history took full advantage of the fake back-end. When Zappos started, nobody believed shoes could be sold online, as customers had to try them on before buying. To quickly test that assumption at low cost, Nick Swinmurn, the Zappos founder, started selling shoes without having any shoes to sell. How? He went to a local shoe store with the proposition that he would take pictures of the shoes, then post them online. If an online customer then placed an order, Swinmurn would promptly go to the local shoe store and buy the shoe at full price, then ship it directly to the customer (Ries). He used someone else’s shoes, at an unsustainable cost structure and level of effort (one that required real estate, inventory, and a lot of manual effort, all of which he could eventually eliminate) as a fake back-end, and it worked brilliantly.
Many healthcare breakthroughs share a common initial reality where building the ideal solution would take material time and investment, but generating evidence that raises the chances for securing investment and driving a strong return can be accomplished with a fake back-end. For example, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) wanted to improve how they cared for women at risk of postpartum preeclampsia, which was the leading cause of morbidity and readmissions among this maternal population. A new standard requiring two blood pressure readings after discharge was known to keep these women safe. Despite best efforts and several attempts, HUP and other leading systems had not been able to acquire those two readings for a single patient. After setting up free walk-in clinics, flexible scheduling, and follow-up calls, success rate was still 0%.
Observations in clinics revealed that these younger women clearly preferred texting as a communication modality. This led to the assumption that sending at-risk women home from the hospital with a blood pressure cuff and texting them to acquire the blood pressure readings might work. Normally, you might build an automated system to execute this intervention, but the team recognized they did not yet know what to build in order to achieve high response rates from the discharged patients. A medical fellow pretended to be the system they might ultimately build, manually texting with the patients. Like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, this person was the fake back-end. Before investing resources to build an automated system, HUP could then test whether the system worked by implementing this rudimentary but functional small-scale version. Since they had a human, manual back-end, the team could rapidly test new approaches to elicit responses from women, iterating daily if needed. They cycled through personalization, various message timings, social support, and more before identifying a design that drove high response rates. In his Pretotyping Manifesto, Alberto Savoia refers to this type of fake back-end as a “Mechanical Turk,” based on the eighteenth-century “machine” that seemed to have the ability to play chess, when in fact there was a small person with chess skills inside the box calling the shots ("Pretotyping.org").
Once the HUP team knew what to build, they transitioned to an automated back-end capable of scaling the intervention. Ultimately, with further work on patient identification, patient engagement, and care team response, they created a service called Heart Safe Motherhood that increased the success rate from 0% to over 80% and reduced morbidity and readmissions in this population by over 80%. This dramatic success was enabled by rapid validation, and the solution was scaled only after the team figured out what worked.
While fake back-ends are only temporary and only work on a small scale, they allow one to see what actually happens when people use the product. Fake back-ends come in a number of varieties and also enable testing with brief “mini-pilots” integrated into operations, to generate contextual evidence for whether to keep going, change direction, or stop. Two flavors of fake back-ends worth noting, in addition to the Mechanical Turk approach, are the concierge model and the mockingbird (Figure 2).
The concierge model involves becoming a person’s personal concierge and taking care of their every need. As someone’s butler, one can learn all of their preferences and constraints. Deep, contextual learning is enabled by walking alongside patients, clinicians, or caregivers for their entire journey, getting actively involved in addressing their needs. A team at Pennsylvania Hospital recently tried this method and discovered important, novel insights into patient populations they had served for years. They helped the patients they had adopted in the concierge model to get appointments, manage transportation issues, navigate medication complexity, problem-solve adherence challenges, and much more. Resulting insights revealed solution directions that had been overlooked. AirBnB’s early history contains great stories of leveraging the concierge model—for example, taking expert pictures of spaces for owners seeking to attract more travelers—to test hypotheses regarding what drove reservations. The insights from walking in another’s shoes and getting deeply embedded in struggles to accomplish tasks, both for insight and to build empathy, remain priceless (see the chapter on “Human-Centered Design: Understanding Customers’ Needs Through Discovery and Interviewing”).
The mockingbird—sometimes called the “Mizner,” after playwright Wilson Mizner, who once said, “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research”—is a fake back-end using a preexisting product close enough to an innovator’s new concept that it can be used for learning. This can be a difficult concept for innovators since their entire focus is doing something better than what came before, so why would one use what came before to test one’s idea? The reality is that a lot can be learned from watching prospective users try an existing, presumably suboptimal product to see how they use it, what users are seeking, and whether the existing product fails in the ways and for the reasons one believes. And since the product already exists, one can begin learning immediately and usually for a lot less money than when starting from scratch. If an academic entrepreneur has a novel idea for a task manager app because the thousand existing similar apps do not suffice, why not just put a dozen of those competitor apps in a dozen people’s hands to start learning, all for roughly $12?
For instance, the Helen O. Dickens Center for Women’s Health at HUP wanted to reduce the burden of depression for antepartum and postpartum women. They hypothesized that an app combining regular, informational text messages and back-and-forth messaging capabilities could help mothers feel more emotionally supported by their provider. However, building such an app would have been a significant investment. The SPIRIT Group research team integrated Text-for-Baby, a texting app developed by Johnson & Johnson, and MyPennMedicine, Penn Medicine’s preexisting platform for communication between patients and providers, to create a theoretical app called MyPregnancy (Interview with Mahraj, Katy). Unfortunately, use of the MyPregnancy app showed no change in communication between mothers and their providers. Furthermore, in follow-up interviews mothers reported that the informational texts did not affect the level of support and engagement they felt in-between doctor appointments. Many apps offering content for antepartum and postpartum depression exist already; using a mockingbird test, the research team discovered there was no use in recreating those in an integrated app. By testing their hypothesis using a preexisting product, they avoided wasting time and money in developing a new app.
As made clear by the Heart Safe Motherhood story above, what fake back-ends allow is contextual testing: moving an idea into actual operations, even if only for a few patients, for a short period of time. We often refer to this operational method as a “mini-pilot,” where one can measure actual impact in the context of a realistic workflow. This technique can be particularly useful when one is trying to validate an idea within a complex environment and the intent is to find out what kind of spillover effects the product might have. With a fake back-end, one can observe not only what happens as a result of the product but also the specifics of making the operation a reality. The Orthopedic Surgery Department at Penn ran such a mini-pilot to evaluate same-day scheduling, a simple concept that was not simple to operationalize and therefore required evidence to overcome inertia. The team constructed a creative fake back-end, in which they published the team lead’s cell number on the website as the contact number for scheduling a same-day appointment. The team lead thus became a fake back-end call center, circumventing the entire machinery of Penn Medicine in order to quickly learn how same-day scheduling might work without prematurely changing core operations. During this pilot, patients could call a number and schedule an appointment for that day. While going through the steps of taking the call, scheduling the appointment, and seeing the patient, the Orthopedic Surgery Department learned how same-day scheduling could be operationalized once a system was automated and fully integrated. Furthermore, the department saw significant increases in conversion rate from patient interest to appointments and procedures, improved commercial mix, and a large percentage of patients who were not only new to Orthopedics but also new to Penn Medicine. With one physician willing to participate, they ran this mini-pilot for just a matter of days. The evidence they generated motivated change that led to the new same-day service being launched at scale.
Why is rapid prototyping important? As Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen said, “Statistically, 93% of all innovations that ultimately become successful started off in the wrong direction; the probability that you will get it right the first time out of the gate is very low” (Graham). Rapid prototyping will enable academic entrepreneurs to learn quickly at low cost, refining their offering to get it right before scaling. While perhaps initially discouraging, invalidating early hypotheses will impart invaluable insight regarding the target problem and the proposed solution. A startup’s two limited resources—time and money—will also be put to use more efficiently. With these relatively small rapid prototyping experiments, the startup can test assumptions one by one, evaluate the idea piece by piece, and quickly amass a body of validated data with which the team can build and improve the product.
For more rapid prototyping for robotics industryinformation, please contact us. We will provide professional answers.