Fieldnote
A two-week sprint turning a vague idea about research notes into a clickable product concept and a fundable story.
- Role
- Independent designer
- Duration
- 2 weeks
- Team
- Two founders, me
- Year
- 2024
Responsibilities
Proposition, user journey, interface design, interactive prototype
The challenge
Two founders had a strong instinct and a document full of features. They needed something people could hold.
The idea covered capture, analysis, sharing and reporting. All four sounded reasonable and none of them was proven.
Constraints
- Two weeks before a scheduled investor meeting
- No engineering resource yet
- The prototype had to survive being clicked by strangers
What the evidence showed
Six short interviews with researchers showed capture was never the problem. Finding an old note six months later was.
Key decisions
Cut to one loop
Capture, resurface, reuse. Everything else moved to a later phase and out of the prototype entirely.
Design the empty state first
The product is most fragile on day one, so the first screen designed was the one with nothing in it.
Prototype in code, not slides
A front-end prototype meant real typing, real search and honest feedback instead of narrated screenshots.
Before and after
Before
A twelve-page feature document with no clear first user action.
After
A five-screen prototype demonstrating one loop end to end.
Outcome
The founders used the prototype in seven investor conversations and narrowed the product to one core loop.
The concept is now in build with an engineering partner, using the same five screens as the reference.
The sprint's real value was permission to remove things. The deck that followed was easy to write once the loop was clear.