Conversational Prototyping

Conversations are the currency for a user researcher. As researchers, we talk to people to discover, to understand, to test and most importantly to learn. Everything we do boils down to how well we’re able to have conversations.

Over the last few weeks, I have witnessed the power of conversations in building ideas and solving problems. Here are 3 such examples:

Exhibit A: Learning Experience = Restaurants

My last week’s article for Learning About Learning emerged from a bunch of interviews I was taking for the Learning Team at NextLeap. I came up with the analogy to better explain what role the learning experience team plays. While talking to multiple people, the analogy became so clear that I knew I had to write about it!

Exhibit B: Short Circuiting Learning

A couple of weeks back I wrote about how as adults we engage in Yo Yo Learning. This week I spoke to a couple of people about cohort based courses and the benefits of structured ways of learning. I realised that the biggest benefit of a structured learning experience is that it short circuits learning. An excerpt from one of these conversations drives home the point pretty well -

“It’s not that I can’t learn this on my own. But what you’ll teach me in a month will probably take me 6 months or even a year and I would probably burn my hands while trying!”

I went and revised my original illustration -

Exhibit C: Communities & Learning

I was stuck with a particular problem statement at work. Not sure how to solve it, I posted on twitter about it -

I've been thinking about how communities can enable learning. Need some inspiration ✨

If you have been a part of any such learning + community experiences or have some resources/ ideas - I'd love to chat in exchange for some 🍺 or ☕

Reply below/ DM me 🙏

— Srishti Sehgal 💥 (@sreshtea) December 2, 2021

The tweet blew up and how! Over the last few days I have been having conversations with people about their experiences and just understanding those better has given me so many new ideas - can’t wait to put them in action!

In a nutshell

David Perell talks a lot about the role conversations play in writing -

4. Have good conversations

Conversations are the first draft of your thoughts.

In any good conversation, you'll say a few things worth writing about.

When something resonates, make a mental note of it, and when you return to your computer, write down what you said.

— David Perell (@david_perell) November 21, 2021

I’ll go one step further to say that conversations can play a role in prototyping. Whether it’s prototyping ideas or solutions, two minds are always better than one - so let’s get talking!

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