Will Susie buy this product?
Strategy to ensure consistent user experience across multiple touch points for a new service or a product.
If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.
Are you a startup?
Are you a team of technologists looking to build a product?
Are you struggling to articulate the experience of your service or a product?
If you are answering ‘yes’ to any of the above questions, this article will give you an idea how to start creating services or products keeping the customer at the core of the product and business strategy.
How can companies ensure that their product is delivering the right experience?
Often when large organizations or even a start-up comprising of 10-50 people, build a product or an application, there are different teams that are tackling different problems on the device and the whole ecosystem that comprises of the service. Though the teams are all working in the same room or office space, they are working in silos!
This often leads to miscommunication across teams. The designers would be focused on the current design trends, the development team is restricted with what is achievable within the span of time, where as the business team is focused on building all the features that are available on the competitor’s applications.
As a Service Designer, the key role lies in aligning the teams to a common goal.
But who defines this goal? How do you define this common goal?
Strategy !!!
As a service designer, the key role lies in defining whose problem are we trying to solve? To do so, it is key to identify the persona!
What is a persona?
As defined by Nielsen Norman Group — Personas are fictional representations and generalizations of a cluster of your target users who exhibit similar attitudes, goals, and behaviors in relation to your product. They’re human-like snapshots of relevant and meaningful commonalities in your customer groups and are based on user research.
Why do you need to identify or define a Persona?
The technique to create a persona depends on multiple factors, like- the company size, the phase of product development, the business model, value proposition etc.
So, let’s take a hypothesis that you are a startup building an intelligent vegetable cutter that can be controlled by an external app.
The team will comprise of — electronic engineers, software developers, Industrial designers, UX designers, UX researchers, UI designers, Business Analysts and key company stakeholders.
The problem that I have faced while working with startups and with large organizations is that, the teams work independently without a common goal. The teams are more focused in delivering their requirements/deliverable than thinking from the User’s shoe. As a design strategist and Service designer, I am aware that the product is not the end goal of the business, but the experience delivered from –
1. Purchasing the product
2. Product delivery
3. Using the product
4. Maintaining the product
5. Returning the product
6. Customer Service
It is the overall end to end experience that a customer will cherish about the brand or a company. In order to maintain consistency across all these touch points of a customer’s journey is key.
Hence defining who are we building for is essential to design the experience of the product ecosystem.
Creating a Persona —
There are two strategy to define a persona — Push or a Pull Strategy. It is a common debate between push and pull strategy.As defined by Strategyzer, Push indicates that you are starting the design of your value proposition from a technology or innovation you possess, whereas pull means you’re beginning with a manifest customer’s job, pain or gain. Pull strategy uses methods like social networking, blogging, word of mouth, strategic placement of a product, media coverage and so on, for reaching a large audience.
In this article I am going to highlight a pull strategy. This is because when a technology layer is added to an existing product like a cutting board that has been in the market for ages, I believe this technology layer should address the larger pain points that the customers face with the existing product.
But how do we start creating this persona?????
In order to execute a pull strategy, it is key to understand your customers.
And it all starts with Interviews!!
In the above study in order to identify your persona, we start with a larger sample of customers which could comprise of people across the age group of 22–45. The age bracket could have been chosen because the vegetable cutter is a technology driven gadget and a market research on early adopters for technology-based components would give us the larger age bracket to target on.
The Pew Research Center has categorized age under the following brackets –
1. The Silent Generation: Born 1928–1945 (73–90 years old)
2. Baby boomers: Born 1946–1964 (54–72 years old)
3. Generation X: Born between 1965–1980 (38–53 years old)
4. There is a micro generation that encompassed those between 1977 and 1983 — they identified themselves as people who grew up in a pre-digital world and later adapted to today’s technology.
5. Gen Y / Millennial further categorized as younger and older millennial: !981–1996 (22 -37 yrs old)
6. Gen Z or Post Millennial: Born between 1997-present (0–21 years old)
These brackets are not scientific but simply tools to understand how different segments are experiencing the world based on social, economical, political and technological touch points in their lives like the recession or 9/11 or the introduction of Iphone to name a few events.
Interviews are phased to drill down to a specific set of personas. In phase 1: The questions must be designed to understand 3 things –
1. What are the needs of each of the segment?
Well you might think how could the needs of each segment be different? Aren’t they all using the cutter for “Cutting vegetable”!! Why is that rocket science??
OK, so let’s break this down. Some of them might be using the cutter to to cut vegetables for a family and they might be using it for longer hours. Where as others belonging to let say younger millennial might be using it only for themselves. They might be health conscious individuals who are cooking for a specific diet. There could also be groups of users who do not know how to cook and are using the cutter for the firs time. They refer a recipe book to find the exact quantity of vegetables to cut.
Each segment has a different relationship with the vegetable cutter.
2. Now Identify each of their pain points.
You will encounter users stating, “I am not sure if the onions I have cut is enough to cook a chicken curry” or “I wish the cutter was easier to clean”.
3. Now identify what each of the segments enjoy about the cutter.
Now map out all the answers you have received. Each answer on a sticky note. I loveee Sticky notes. They just help to think and move things around easily.
By mapping out the answers you start seeing patterns and behavioral categorization of different users.
After this phase, I generally hold a meeting with the stake holders, designers and technology teams to brainstorm and understand –
Which pain points are addressable and align with our Value proposition?
What is the feasibility of addressing these pain points?
Through this brainstorming session as a design strategist, you will get a clear idea regarding what is the larger goal of the company with the product and at the same time what is currently build able.
Hence from this discussion we create a lean persona of the segment who would be willing to invest in our MVP (minimum viable product) as well as be Influencers to other segments as well.
As a strategist I build a narrative based on the interview findings, market research and the brainstorming session with the team.
For an example, the narrative could be that our primary persona is an older millennial who is tech savvy. He/she is not very well versed with cooking. They need a recipe book and follows it line by line. They are extremely health conscious and keeps a check on their daily calorie consumption and updates it on their health app.
The lean persona becomes a starting point for Interview Phase 2. Before conducting the interview, I encourage sending out a survey.
(If you need to know the difference between an Interview and a Survey, please comment below, based on the need I could write an article on it as well.)
Why do we need a Survey???
The survey is used for building a participant data set. I do this so that we filter out all the users who fall outside the persona that has been defined.
This survey for building participant data set is very important because if you start interviewing the wrong personas, the product strategy could be misaligned with our value proposition.
So how do we build this Survey?
With the team of designers and researchers, we identify larger qualities that this lean persona entails. The UX jargon for that is “Themes”.
The larger theme of this lean persona let’s say is –
· Experimental
· Health Conscious
· Methodical
· Community driven
· Tech savvy
The survey is structured such that each of the quality is assessed with the person who fills the form.
For example, in order to find how methodical a person is in his life — You could ask the following questions –
1. Do you maintain a weekly or daily to do list?
2. How planned are you with your daily meal regime? (scale of 1–5)
3. Do you calculate the calorie that you consume? (your options could be — Yes, I do it very rigorously | I have a rough idea of the calorie I consume | I am well versed now I do not have to calculate because I have a fixed diet)
Certain questions will help us in eliminating a user at an initial stage itself. This could be based on their age or if they are not community driven or methodical at all.
Each of the answer option is given a specific rating from (1–5) and a researcher would categorize the person who filled the survey based on how close they align with the lean persona.
If the average rating of the survey taker is a 5, he/she falls exactly within the persona. The lower the average, the further they are from the persona.
The second Interview —
This interview is structured specifically to understand more about the persona. His/Her daily routine, the way they plan their meals, the apps they use, the food they eat, the vegetables they consume. The time of the day they cook, their motivation to cook, the communities they contribute towards etc.
This helps to build on the lean persona. Ideally, I also ask few of the participants to click photos and maintain a journal regarding their daily touch points.
This is termed as a diary study. Which confirms if what the users state that they “do” if it is true!
Along with diary studies, I also shadow the participant when they are cooking to get a deep insight into their pain points.
All these pictures and quotes from the interview is collected and further added to the mood board representing the persona. This gives a clear idea to the industrial designers and business teams ‘Who are they building for??’
This exercise adds more detail and character to the persona ( lets call her Susie) that is created.
Susie becomes the sole decision maker while building the product.
After this process… during every conversation we ask each team, do you think Susie will buy this product? :)
