Income-generating Wizard of Oz prototype

What is a Wizard of Oz prototype you might ask?

In the grand tradition of the Mechanical Turk and other charlatanry, a Wizard of Oz prototype is a tool used to trick the user into thinking a process is being completed automatically, when in fact it's being completed manually by people behind the scenes.

These kinds of prototypes are super helpful for designers to understand pain points, particularly around the UX of a product.

I used a Wizard of Oz prototype not only to test UX, but to prove a business case for a product development team... and in fact to make money toward funding that team.

The prototype I created eventually became CultureMoves; or rather, CultureMoves was the first horizon in the journey to realising the experience described in the prototype I designed and sold to customers.

Had I known then what I know now I'd have designed the prototype completely differently. Turns out things that are relatively easy for a graphic design professional to know and judge are incredibly hard for a piece of software to deal with. I would also have known that what I was designing and realising with 3rd party software wasn't 'horizon 3' on the product development... more like 'horizon 12'. That is to say, there were a lot (A LOT) of steps between a tech-team-built MVP and the experience I was serving to our customers.

But hey, you live and learn.

And, I am proud of the experience I created and delivered to customers. And fair enough too - it was a paid-for service.

We called them The [your company name here] Way.

At it's height we were managing 11 customers in the prototype, each with 20+ pages of content they could 'update' (read: send requests for me to update) at will. Each customer instance managed thousands of pieces of unique data (like team members and contact details) and while each output was based on a template, each was visually, tonally and structurally customised to the customer's brand.

It included instructions to create pieces of content for The [ ] Ways, as well as explainers for why the content was needed and the psychological theory behind key pieces. We also created a sample Way for customers to look through, so they knew what they were getting.

The prototype held commercially sensitive information in a non-crawlable but sharable format, and represented our customer's businesses internally to their people and externally to select groups (;like shareholders). Each prototype needed to evolve with each customer's business - a complicated ask.

So, to create this prototype I used an interconnected series of 3rd party programs: forms from typeform (lots of forms), visual presentation from adobe, hosting via squarespace and, eventually, a custom-coded email delivery system (created by my very talented colleague). Together we managed these systems before our tech team came on board and we started developing the product proper.

While I designed the experience, eventually a small team grew to manage it, so as part of my design I was also mindful to make sure the prototype made sense to others; to be able to hand over the reigns to the team so that I could transition into the product management role.

I am being deliberately obtuse about the details of the product here to honour the trust our customers placed in us. If you're reading this and interested to know more I'd be happy to have a chat about it.