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Chapter 4. Developing Applications in Cooperation: X’treme Prototyping
It also important for the developers to have a clear understanding of the stakeholders
of the domain. What are the di erent groups related to these domain? Who is most
willing to rethink the current work practice and who is most open to radical new
ideas?
4.1.3 Distill Opportunities for Change
The next step is to determine opportunities for change and improvement. It is key
to look for higher-level potentials that generate more radical changes than gradual
improvements assisting the user in his current task. It is important to look for
opportunities that help the users to better achieve their goals (goal-driven). The
advantage of a goal-driven approach instead of improving the current work prac-
tice (task-driven) is the potential for higher innovation: Instead of only gradually
improving and assisting the user in his current task, goal-directed concepts cannot
only show new opportunities of new technology but also of how new technology can
change the work practice users have not taken into account before. Accordingly, a
resulting concept should focus on achieving the users’ ultimate goals through novel
technology in combination with changing current work practices. Depending on the
ability of users to extrapolate, it should be stated clearly that we are not looking
for a short-term solution (only incremental task improvement), which could be im-
plemented quickly, but rather search for very di erent solutions to solve the overall
problems (goals) of the user in an innovative way.
The result of this phase should be a new concept how to solve at least one of the users’
goals in a new way, regardless of how the implementation looks now. Obviously, this
phase is the most creative part of our approach.
4.1.4 Develop an X’treme Prototype
The fourth step is to develop a prototype that can represent and illustrate the
strengths of one or several concepts to the user. The prototype should be extreme
in the sense that it exceeds the user’s expectations and stimulates to rethink estab-
lished practices. X’treme Prototype are more extreme than usual prototypes: the
emphasis is on future opportunities instead of meeting users’ needs as quickly as
possible. So exceeding user’s expectations makes X’treme Prototype di erent from
extreme programming
[
Beck 2000
]
, where users’ expectations should be met in short
converging cycles. The main focus should be that the user can experience new op-
portunities. A good picture of the user’s understanding of technology helps to build
a prototype in a timely fashion that is most functional and most innovative. For ex-
ample, in the hospital project (see Section 3.3) we built a prototype for doctors and
knew that they were already familiar with WLAN. In consequence, we could skip
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