[MUSIC] Throughout these videos, we have emphasized the use of prototypes for communication and for learning, and especially the idea of learning fast. Now, learning fast means making mistakes. You just can't learn without them. And aspiring leaders really need to understand this. The best people and the best teams are often ones that make a lot of mistakes, but they're also ones who learn from those mistakes quickly and keep moving forward. How exactly does this work? How do you build a team that's driven to succeed, yet embraces failure along the way? To help me address these questions, I'm delighted to welcome back Hannah Chung and Aaron Horowitz. You'll remember them from the first video of this module. Hannah and Aaron cofounded Sproutetell which aims to become the Disney of healthcare using play as a catalyst to make health fun. Their flagship product Jerry the bear is an interactive toy for children with type one diabetes. Hanna, Arron and Jerry, [LAUGH] welcome back. It's great to be talking to you again. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the sort of decisions that we have to make based on things we learn from prototypes. I wonder if you've got any stories you can share with me about times when you've learned some lessons, maybe some hard lessons and how you've reacted to those. >> Absolutely. Well I would say the majority of prototypes don't go exactly as planned. Some stories are a little bit funnier than others. I think that we're the couple that comes to mind. One is one a little more technical. We had on our first or second revision of putting in circuit boards that we ever made. We had ordered them out, got them in, populated the board, tested connections, things worked. Jerry booted up, and instead of saying hello, which Jerry typically does when he starts, Jerry started playing music. He was playing some mariachi music, dubstep, and we just couldn't figure out what was going on. And this perplexed us for, gosh, over two weeks. And it turned out we had left one pin unattached and it turned into a radio antenna. >> [LAUGH] >> In electronics design this is something that's well known, to amateur electronics designers this is like, the dark arts of black magic. And so for us it was just a little educational in terms of just some of the complexities of what we were designing or really how much is known by the experts and how valuable it is to go to experts. Because one of our mentors, Professor Michael Peshkin, looked at the circuit diagram and, within five seconds, instantly knew what the problem was. And so, just the knowledge of actually reaching out to your support network and to your mentors when you run into a challenge was a huge learning lesson. >> Yeah that's a great lesson, it's great. Any other stories? >> The story that comes to my mind is another funny one. The early version of Jerry, when you feed Jerry the food, Jerry will say, and a a food name like banana, mm apple. And we though it [INAUDIBLE] confirmation. Like that is great! Everybody needs a confirmation. But that thought was totally proved wrong when we tested with the kids because what happened was we were having this play session with kids playing with Jerry, and it was an open play session where kids were playing with Jerry however they want to play. And in the end, we found out all of our bears were hyperglycemic. And they had a very high blood sugar levels. And we wondered what was going on. It turns out when Jerry said ooh banana, all the kids who were four or five though Jerry wants more banana. That's why he says banana. So they just kept feeding banana, banana, banana nonstop. Because he just thought Jerry wanted bananas for the whole time. So that was a great learning lessons for a confirmation, that you think theoretically's going to work, doesn't work. And we took out the voice confirmation, and Jerry says, mm, delicious, no food afterwards. >> [LAUGH] >> [INAUDIBLE] we had to make [INAUDIBLE]. >> Yeah. That's a great story as well. [LAUGH] So some really important points there, understanding when it's time to reach out to your support network to go and find an expert, understanding when your user is the expert, and how to learn from the user. Wonderful. But you know, both of those examples, they thankfully didn't really force you to sort of completely change your course or reframe the way you were thinking about Jerry. But sometimes I think we learn some really profound things from our prototypes and they force more profound reframing. I wonder if you've got any examples along those lines that you can you can share. >> We do have one. So I would say our seventh or eighth prototype that we had. You know Jerry's plan was solely on, you checked Jerry's blood sugar levels. You [INAUDIBLE] foods and that was it. Just put care play. Nothing else in that. We actually thought our prototype was pretty final. So we're ready to do a longer testing session with the kids. So what we did was we built ten of the same prototype, we give it out to ten families in Rhode Island, and asked them you know, gave them a journal and a camera, and a journal and asked them to you know, play with this bear for a week and we'll come back and pick it up. And what happened was, when we saw all these results, we've seen that kids who are more newly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, who played with Jerry for three hours a day for the whole week. So they logged about 21 hours of play sessions a week, which is really amazing. However, kids who have had diabetes for maybe over a year, they play with Jerry. They are very active the first few days, but they just have a total drop off. And you wonder why is this going on and it turns out. Even Jerry just having a care place was way too easy for them. And Jerry not having any personality or any stories, there's no reason for the kids to come back to play with Jerry more. So it became like a very instant introduction and it was not engaging throughout. So from there we thought to yourselves, Jerry needs a storyline, Jerry needs to have a personality. And in order to share those stories more effectively, we might have to change from a black and white screen to have a color touchscreen to give it more of the story, stuff like that. So that helped us realize we need to develop a deeper software, and models for Jerry and make him more attractive so that kind of helped you know kind of would push us to have another ear of development cycle to which to have a better Jerry afterwards. So there was a big renovation afterwards where Jerry could of changed from just a pure toy just like on here to more of a kind of delivery tool to help with health education and stuff like that. >> Wow. That's a really big sort of reframing, right? From thinking of Jerry as a toy to really thinking of Jerry as this, this content delivery so they can have more rich interactions. It makes it makes great sense, but I gather from there you're telling me it took a lot of further development to make that switch? And this is at a time when you thought you were almost ready to release the product, right? How did you react to that? >> [LAUGH] >> Well, I would say that we weren't that far ready to release. We had made these ten prototypes, but we hadn't started design for manufacturing, anything like that, speccing boards. So for us it was, gosh, just more out of a necessity. We kind of knew that this is a change we need to make to improve engagement. Because the whole while, we never wanted Jerry to be one of those toys that gets two weeks of engagement and goes and sits in a toy box. On the other end of the equation, we really had no clue that it would take over a year of development at the time. We were pretty naive. We were still a team of two. It was an expertise that we didn't have on our team, a software developer, and Android developer in particular. And so we said, oh, yeah, let's do this thing. Jerry needs more stories. We're going to add some more stories. It's as simple as that. And so it was certainly a learning experience, and wouldn't change a thing looking back. Also looking forward, when we were at that point, could not have entirely perceive the process that lay ahead of us. >> Yeah, the two of you have to sort of change yourselves a little bit along the way? Did you have to sort of pick up some new skills, think about things differently? >> Definitely. In my case, curiously, the way I had to illustrate totally changed from paper to pen to totally digital. And at that point, I never really used Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to really learn how to illustrate. And it was at that time when you're first introduced to a new tool, it's a little bit daunting, because you have to learn quickly and what you're producing is going to be in a product in a child's hand so because it has a very high bar of what you need to hit. So, it definitely took a couple of weeks that I felt like I was in a cave just trying to learn how to use a bigger tablet with different software tools. But, you know, the more you build, the more you fail and the more you try different methods and, you know, and see different tutorials and things like that, you become faster at using your tools and you, kind of, build your confidence using the tool too, so I think that was a big transformation in sort of the tools I had to use to doodle or illustrate Jerry. >> Yeah, I can see how that could be very daunting, yet I applaud that you just jumped in and did it. And in the end, it may take a couple of weeks of real hard work to learn that new tool, but then you've got that capability and the big picture. It seems like a very wise investment. So, kudos to you guys. So, actually fast-forwarding now to the present, things appear to be going really, really well, right? You're putting Jerry into the hands of kids who can benefit from him, you guys are demoing to the president, you're building a team, the company's growing. And I wonder if, you know now that you're really seeing the fruits of your labor, is this changing your view now on sort of prototyping and how you use it? So, yeah, what's it like today? >> I think for us the tools that it used definitely changes, but I think the process doesn't change. So the process, in terms of use design thinking all the time. We do the same thing as we talked earlier, but build purpose, built up purpose built prototypes, and also we uuu. It's build more prioritized repartee typing and faster where we so far on. So, I think that is really true. And, I think that ultimately finds the company have in our team, you know, where we have we don't wait. We just start building and we try to balance between research and protecting the same. So I think that's very important as, you know to be like [INAUDIBLE] company but also to have a strategy. >> Aarin you have any thoughts on this? >> [LAUGH] >> How do you now as a leader, how do you think about prototyping? >> Yeah, I think just to underscore what Hannah said is that it occurs kind of at all levels of the organization. From prototyping business models to prototyping the nitty-gritty of where a button is going to be placed in the hands of a child. And it really comes down to creating a culture among our company where prototyping kind of the go to. It is step number zero of any process, and the settler to any argument that arises is let's build it and test it, right? Let's take this kind of data-driven, user-centered approach. So I think looking at it from a top level, really, for us, we've tried to build this prototyping practice into all the verticals of the company, from content creation to hardware design, all the way through to this. >> Wonderful. Wonderful. We'll that's just terrific, great, great advice, you know, great way to build a company. Do you have any final words? >> I guess just start building, you know, especially when you have an idea. It doesn't need to be, you know, building out the full range of the entire concept, but starting with something small and going out and testing it just to get that initial piece of feedback because you might be surprised what you learn. It might change your entire direction. >> Beautiful. Well, Hannah, Aaron, Jerry, thank you very, very much for sharing your stories, sharing your wisdom, sharing your time with us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, it's been a lot of fun. >> Outstanding. Well, this concludes our series of videos on prototyping. I recognize that we haven't taught you how to use a 3D printer or glue a box out of foam core, but I hope that we've given you a valuable perspective on the prototyping process as well as its role in design innovation and leadership. We've talked about the use of prototypes for communication and for learning. We've emphasized learning for unit time and talked about the things that can help us maximize it. These include rapid prototyping, but more importantly, the discipline to build the simplest prototype that will get you the answers you need. We've talked about using prototypes with users in order to get rich, untarnished feedback. And we've talked about learning from this feedback and being prepared to iterate. Finally, we've talked about instilling a cultural learning, through prototyping, across your organization. In the next module my colleague Liz Gerber will dive deeper yet into the topic of building an organization that's capable of executing a strong design innovation process. [MUSIC]
