📌 Presented on May 22nd, 2019 as part of the first iteration of the Inventors for Health Program.
As we approach the third bootcamp we'll be putting the supposed user of our products and services back firmly back in control of our development process. On Friday, for the first time, you'll be putting your prototypes in the hands of your users with the aim of gaining feedback to improve what you've created. Don't be surprised if what you hear deviates from what you expected and as always, remain open and attentive during your testing sessions.
For those that weren't able to make it yesterday, I briefly outlined some of the ways you can go about structuring the feedback that you receive in order to make it useful for the further development of your concepts. This will entail deliberate prioritisation of this information leading to meaningful iterations of your concepts.
I'll touch on a few of my favourite tools for processes like this. There are many out there so do experiment for yourselves to find out what works best for you and your teams. The first that I discussed were feedback heatmaps.
Feedback heatmaps are an especially powerful tool to use when looking for correlations between feedback sessions or structuring interview data. Metrics you can use to develop heatmaps are only limited by your creativity, and can reveal unexpected connections between user groups that you hadn't anticipated. Importantly, each point should be used to represent a single user.
It could be, for example, that children aged 7 and below are found to be closely linked to women aged 65 and up. The question then becomes; why is that and what is it about a product or feature set that lead to that correlation. These relationships can then be exploited to further tailor your product or service to a given set of users.
Heatmaps can also be used to look at the relationship between your user and a particular product or service feature. Take commercial air travel for example. On each axis, you might consider some meaningful statistic like the amount of frequent flyer points the user redeems to book hotel rooms in a given year, and the number of times they collect frequent flyer points for personal travel. This data might indicate to you that your point redeeming system is useful among employees booking for their colleagues but not so for private persons booking their own travel. Or it may reveal something else entirely.
Categorical mapping can help you and your team to nail down what aspects of your concept are resonating with users and where it may be falling short. During interviews or product tests, your users may indicate to you that one element of the product or service is important to them, such as the speed with which they can use it to perform an action, or the sense of security they feel (or lack thereof). In a similar fashion to heatmapping, you can use categorical mapping to plot a single user around a topic important to them. Use this to determine which features to build out further and which can be left behind.
The final tool that I shared yesterday was experience mapping. The above is a very simplistic version of what an experience map could look like, and can be thought of as a pared-down version of a service blueprint. The core function remains the same, however, and that is that each interaction with your product or service can be divided and analysed for deficiencies. How granular you decide to make an experience map is up to you, but I would recommend dividing it in various stages. Taking the example of commercial flight again you can think of:
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the initial search for a ticket
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purchasing the ticket
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packing your bag and heading to the airport
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the airport experience
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boarding the flight
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taking the flight
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exiting the flight
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the trip from the airport to your final destination
... or any of the service elements that make up the experience that you are taking responsibility for as founders. Each of the above could have it's own experience map. An interesting exercise to determine whether or not you are differentiated enough from the competition would be to map the experiences of using the current alternatives and then map your own product or service experience with the help of a user to see how you stack up. A good rule of thumb detailed in
Peter Thiel's Zero to One, is that the experience of using your product or service should be one order of magnitude (or 10X) better than the current alternative if you want to succeed in the long term.
After gathering and structuring your feedback you may feel like you've got a pretty good idea of what your audience wants, but desire is a fickle thing, and what your users say they want might not actually be what they want at all. Central to all of this is that you as founders and change-makers get to decide where to steer your product or service and this is both an honour and a responsibility.
You may be immediately tempted to cater to the majority, or the group of users who appear to derive the greatest gain by using your product or service. Don't forget to consider the minority in this process as well. After all, a dedicated minority can become the champions of your new concept while a shift in mindset from a dominant majority could leave you without a user-base.
Finally, take advantage of the quick wins that arise when testing with your users. A simple modification can make a world of difference to the experience your users have. This can have ripple-effect projecting outwards from a satisfied user group.
Last slide, I promise - this one is self-explanatory.
The development of your product or service can be exponential if you want it to be. As part of Bootcamp 2 we considered the needs that each of your products addresses. Putting your prototypes in the hands of users will tell you definitively how well you managed to address them, or if they were really relevant to your users. The best way to ensure that you're meeting or exceeding these needs is to continuously modify your concept through quick iterations until it really delights your users and achieves a one order of magnitude improvement in a meaningful metric. This may mean that a core feature or even the core premise of your concept will need to change, but embrace this, and don't forget to document this change along the way.
A final piece of advice from my side: illusions can be a powerful thing. If you're unable to deliver on major improvements in all relevant categories for your user (and you're probably not), then don't be afraid to make your product or service appear that it does. There are ways to make a product feel fast (think cars) or a product feel safe (think credit cards) even when they might not be. This is the magic of design, and can add the nuance to your concept that it needs to maintain majority adoption.
A single order of magnitude improvement on an existing product or service will be self-evident to your users, and will be what makes them switch. A convincing design will ensure that they never feel the need to switch again...
That's it from my side. I can't wait to see what we can create together as part of Bootcamp 3 and beyond!