The day · Page 49
How to run the round
For you only
Thirty minutes, five users, four prototypes. The arithmetic only works if the half hour is choreographed. Here is the choreography.
The setup. One testing station per team: a laptop or phone with the prototype link open, two chairs, the team's sticky-note assumptions within glancing distance. Users rotate between stations; five to eight minutes per station gets each user through two or three prototypes in the window, and each team three or more fresh reactions.
The split. In each pair, one person runs the station, the other preps the pitch (Chapter 23), and they swap notes at 16:00 sharp. The strongest pitch material of the day, what the user actually did ten minutes ago, flows straight from one teammate's notes into the other's opening line.
Your welcome to the users, all five at once, one minute:
Say something like
"Thank you for coming. Four teams built four rough prototypes today, this morning they did not exist. Your job is to try them and think out loud as you go. You cannot break anything and you cannot be wrong. The builds are being tested, not you. Be as blunt as you like; the polite version helps nobody."
Your job during the round is traffic control, not research. Move users between stations on time, keep the sponsor (if they arrived early) watching rather than steering, and listen for the moment worth writing down: the question a user asks that no team anticipated. That question has a habit of deciding the whole day.
Timing flex. Thirty minutes is the floor and it works. If your day has slack, stretch the round toward an hour and let each user sit longer. Never steal the time from the build; take it from drinks.