đź‘‹ Hey! It is Karin here. 

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How would you experience your child’s smile if you were blind? 

I’m not blind, but I can imagine the experience will be time-mediated. You either listen to their smile or touch their face. 

What if a product could change your experience? And what if a prototype could create the same emotions? 

This is what we aim for with prototypes: to evoke the same emotion the final product will create, with an incomplete version of the final product. 

Take Project Kyoto, a prototype developed by a team at Microsoft Research to help blind and low-vision people navigate social situations. The prototype used AI and augmented reality to provide audio descriptions of people and their emotions to visually impaired users through headphones. (Source: Microsoft Research)

It would tell you in your ear what people around you might be feeling. 

For Erin, who had been blind since birth, using the prototype meant she could "see" her son's smile across the room at a family gathering. When she used it, she cried, saying "I've never been able to see him smile before. I can feel it when I touch his face, but I've never been able to see it from across the room." (quote)

What is experience fidelity?

This is the power of experience fidelity: the ability of a prototype to evoke similar emotions as the full product. Once achieved, you can transfer the insights from the prototype to your product. 

Experience fidelity goes beyond the 3 usual fidelities for prototypes: 

  • Data fidelity: how closely the data used in a prototype matches the real data that will be used in the final product. It’s about accuracy of information representation.
  • Visual fidelity: how closely a prototype's visual appearance resembles the final product in terms of its level of detail, realism, and overall look-and-feel. It's about aesthetic and graphical accuracy.
  • Interaction fidelity: how closely a prototype's interactive elements and behaviors match those of the final product, focusing on the precision of user interactions.

In practice, aspiring founders make choices in these three areas to best simulate the final idea. When they don’t let the user experience what the product will achieve, they risk missing the point. 

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It doesn’t actually get at what really matters: experience fidelity. 

Experience fidelity is about emotional and experiential accuracy, achieving an experience similar to the final product’s emotional impact. It’s about creating an authentic user experience and emotional connections with products. It leads to honest user feedback because emotionally involved users care, leading to accurate product validation. 

How to achieve experience fidelity in prototypes? 

One unconventional way of doing this is using storyboarding. 

A storyboard visually depicts a user’s journey with a product or service, similar to a short comic. It originated in motion picture production and was popularized by Walt Disney Studios who used sketches of frames since the 1920s. It helped Disney animators create the film’s world before actual production. (Source: Smashing Magazine)

A Peter Pan Storyboard

They are powerful as a visual tool because they are memorable, relatable, and elicit emotional reactions. 

A storyboard helps product owner or CEOs map out the user’s emotional experience and pinpoint emotional moments. Visualizing them provides valuable insights. 

Let’s take Airbnb as an example. The CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, borrowed the storyboarding strategy from Disney to shape the future of Airbnb. The team mapped the emotional moments of an Airbnb stay into a storyboard, visualizing the entire user journey. With this, they realized the experience mostly occurred offline, at the stay in and around the homes. Their learning? They needed to link the online and offline experiences with an app. (Source: Brian Chesky's X profile)

Storyboards as prototypes are useful because they help stakeholders understand the user’s world and how a product or service fits into and improves the user’s life. 

Take-aways as an aspiring founder

Consider using a storyboard to illustrate the experience and identify emotional touchpoints. Consider it as a tool with your team and stakeholders. Use it in pitches or instead of pitches to build empathy for the emotional journey your product or service offers. Iterate on the emotional feedback. 

Their primary goal is to communicate an experience that can affect or transform the user. 

Prototypes don’t require the same medium as the final product. For example, in the case of a movie, a storyboard isn’t a trailer, but a 2D static representation of the movie. It provides a similar experience in another medium, offering different insights. 

Conclusion

The ultimate goal when prototyping is achieving experience fidelity, transcending the traditional focus on data, visual, and interaction fidelities. Embracing this concept can revolutionize your approach to product development and user testing as an aspiring founder.

By prioritizing the emotional journey of your users, you're not just building a product; you're crafting an experience that resonates on a deeper level. Tools like storyboarding can be invaluable, allowing you to visualize and refine the emotional touchpoints of your product or service.

The most successful products aren't just functional—they're transformative. They create emotional connections and solve problems in ways that truly impact users' lives. By focusing on experience fidelity in your prototypes, you're preparing for products that don't just work, but that truly matter to your users.

As you progress in your entrepreneurial journey, challenge yourself to think beyond the technical aspects of your prototype. Ask yourself: "Does this prototype evoke the same emotions and experiences as my final product?" If it does, you're on the right track to creating something impactful.

Thanks for being here!

Karin

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