Posts Tagged ‘user journeys’
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Here’s an update on the project. It includes some stats on the market’s need for a service like this, as well as more information on how the service would work. There are also three user journeys.
All of this is subject to change as the service evolves, but for the most part, this is where we’re headed.
If anything in this presentation resonates with you, please feel free to jump in with a comment.
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Mike and I attended TechnologyWorld 09 in Coventry this week to meet some people who we hope will use this service. We wanted to find out what they think of it, and ideally start to build a community of interested users.
We spoke with a lot of people who had some really positive feedback about the work we’re doing. One of the challenges we had, though, was explaining just what we’ve been doing.
From words to pictures and back again
I’ve been working ‘in digital’ (sorry, folks) for a while now, and something I find endlessly tricky is figuring out the right way to explain (in spoken words and — at least in my case — flappy hand gestures) exactly what you’re creating (out of written words, pixels, algorithms, etc etc).
I don’t know if there’s one best way to do this, but I suspect there isn’t — in fact, I reckon it’s a lot like teaching something, where you find that some people learn with a teleological approach, whereas others do better with a metaphor or hands-on learning or whatever other method.
And so, without further ado, here are my findings on how to get early feedback from future users, with nothing but words and hand gestures…
1. Whatever you do, don’t bore them…
Sometimes I walk the potential user through a possible user experience, but I find that to be a roundabout way of doing things. It’s sort of like telegraphing punches: by the time you finally deliver, your target has been anticipating it for so long that they’re almost bored… and needless to say, you don’t land the punch quite as powerfully as you’d have liked to.
I avoided doing this in my TechnologyWorld chats, as I thought it asked for too much time and commitment from the people I was speaking with (after all, they want to tell me about their work, too).
2. Problem-solving sometimes works
Another way of going about it is with a problem-solution method, where you can walk through a problem and show how your product solves it. The downside is that this can take a while, and you run the risk of losing your audience if the problem you spell out doesn’t resonate.
3. Answer the biggie: what’s in it for me?
Finally — and this is the method was very successful on Monday — you can try walking users (well, future, would-be users) through the benefits of what you’re doing. I found that people responded very positively to learning about how this could help them… even if they didn’t necessarily need all of the help it could offer.
One thing I have learned though is that it’s prudent to be really humble when you do this — it’s all too easy to alienate the people you’re talking to by sounding a bit overconfident about the horse you’re backing.
I’d like to know how other people approach this challenge. Ideally, we’d have hours to play with and all sorts of sketches and slides and user journeys to walk through… but that isn’t always the case. With five or fewer minutes to play with, what’s the best way to (really, solidly) explain a digital service?
UK Technology Global Markets group