IDEO.org Fellow Liz Ogbu tells the story of how the Kenya water kiosk team used rapid prototyping on the ground in Nairobi to understand what the ingredients of a successful water, hygiene, and nutrition business might be.

Prototyping doesn’t have to be relegated to after the development of a well-crafted design. It can be part of the process that helps you get to that better design. While in Nairobi, our IDEO.org team found that prototyping could help us understand what the ingredients to a successful combined water, hygiene, and nutrition business might be. By testing assumptions about consumer preferences, brand possibilities, sales strategies, and product mixes, we gained great insight about the business model components we were considering. What follows are our adventures in prototyping.

Figuring out the prototypes

While in San Francisco, we brainstormed some initial business model possibilities. Once we arrived in Nairobi, we spent the first few days interviewing various stakeholders, including customers, related businesses, and government agencies. Combined with our earlier research and ideas, we were able to identify three strong prototypes that we wanted to test: 1) a water kiosk that also sold health and nutrition products, 2) a mkokoteni (mobile cart) selling health and nutrition products alongside water, and 3) a door-to-door subscription service selling water along with health and nutrition products.

Our prototypes were by no means fully robust business models. Instead, they each represented the basic structure of a model, within which we isolated specific components that we wanted to understand. By keeping them relatively simple, we were able to more accurately analyze the results of our field tests.

Creating a fake brand

For our test to be effective, we realized that we needed a fake brand that could create a convincing uniform package to consumers. We created a fake name and logo (SmartLife), and sought to make both evocative of the desired characteristics of the brand.

The night before the prototype launch, we ironed heat transfers of the SmartLife logo onto t-shirts, placed logo stickers onto empty jerry cans, placed a selection of local and foreign products into bags, and drafted scripts and pricing lists for our prototype staff. The SmartLife prototype brand was ready to launch!

Testing the prototypes

With the branded products and equipment alongside three strong prototype ideas, we were ready to deploy our test. We decided to be ambitious and test out the three business model ideas on the same day, at the same time, in the same neighborhood.

We had a wacky start on our first day that included the first mkokoteni driver running away, the kiosk not having any water supply for the day, both the branded t-shirts and one of our clients being forgotten at the hotel, and team member Robin Bigio scrounging for clean water from various sources, including a church! Despite the crazy start, the prototype experiments were all very successful. Here are a few key learnings fueling our subsequent research:

• Embrace the happy accidents: Our prototypes were originally supposed to use colored t-shirts and jerry cans as part of the branded gear, but neither was available. We were afraid that because things that are white get dirty easily, people would reject them. Ironically, in all of the prototypes, the use of white in branding was one of the most successful elements. To customers, it represented cleanliness: “We believe it is something pure that you’re selling.” Instead of a detriment, the white color has provided insight around brand direction.

• Pay attention to the details: It was a lot of work to develop and prepare the branded gear for our prototypes. Leading up to the test, we sometimes questioned whether it was all worth it. But in the end, being consistent with things like sign boards, t-shirts, jerry cans, and sales pitches really sold the idea of a new brand and helped us have much more specific conversations around consumer desires, relationships, and bonds of trust.

• Help people take risks: During one of our customer interviews, a woman named Mary told us that: “in life, you have to take risks because if you don’t take risks, you can’t move ahead.” But taking a risk on a new product, particularly if you have little income to spare, can be a difficult proposition. We let people sample the products, from our clean water to a children’s food supplement. This proved enormously successful. One woman cleaned us out of the food supplements, saying that she had never seen the product before but “now that she’s tasted it, she knows it’s good.”

• Turn customers into advocates. The ability to sample products not only drove sales, it also created an unexpected bonus: people became advocates as well as consumers. At the kiosk, one man was so convinced about the clean water we were selling that he began to verbally tout the brand while standing at the kiosk. In the 15-20 minutes that he hung around, he regularly had a crowd of people around him, listening intently!

• Continue to ask questions. Running prototypes is not only about the act of observing, but also about asking questions. Whenever we could, we asked customers questions regarding their preferences. And after we closed up shop for the day, we interviewed all of our support staff to document the information they had heard. It was through all of these conversations that we learned things such as the interest many people had in products that would be good for their children and that trust was a huge factor in people’s acceptance of a new brand or customer offering.

Our experiment in prototypes has helped us define the business model in ways that we couldn’t have predicted or achieved from just interviews alone. In fact, these prototypes served as meaningful provocations that have stimulated our conversations with our clients and even improved the quality of our subsequent interviews. We’re also planning to build off of the results with another prototype test later this week. Stay tuned for the stories from that adventure!