Lessons from creating our breast cancer app — Guest blog from Kristina Barrick, Digital Innovation Manager at Breast Cancer Care
Being on CAST’s Fuse accelerator was brilliant for many reasons. One was that it was amazing in teaching us how to talk to the future users of our product.
I’ll admit that I had considered myself a dab hand at user interviews already and so I was a little taken aback when we were given a presentation on how to conduct a user interview. “I already know this”, I thought to myself. It was probably after the fourth user interview that it dawned on me: while I knew how to find out users’ problems, my method was skipping a vital step: I had no real evidence of their day-to-day needs and behaviour.
You can take some significant problems and come up with solutions until the cows come home. You can involve users heavily in the process. You can create a solution that the users even asked for themselves. But when your product launches, will the market adopt it?
People can often talk eloquently and at length about their problems, but finding out what their needs and behaviours are can be much more challenging.
Fuse taught us how to apply ‘grounded theory’ to the interview process. This enables you to properly identify user needs and group them into categories. By doing this you can identify commonalities and patterns which often defy your own preconceptions. The research we gathered in this phase was absolute gold dust. It blew some of our assumptions out the water and gave us a really strong starting point for coming up with solutions.
Having explored many ideas, one idea in particular stood out; it can be described briefly as ‘life-hacks’ for people living beyond breast cancer. We tested it with pieces of paper mimicking a flash card. If the women were intrigued by a title on the front, they flipped the card over to discover a longer blurb of information. They could discard cards they disliked, delve into more information if they felt it was interesting, or keep cards aside to refer back to.
That testing session was a lightbulb moment the users were totally in control of the information and so little was demanded of them — they found the cards both helpful and fun and they wanted more.
We’ve called the tool BECCA (Breast Cancer Care App) for the time being, and it’s a digital version of our paper flashcards. So far it’s tested really well, and we will be launching it in beta in October. If you want to test it, register here.
There comes a point when you stop asking people to test your product and it’s out there, for anyone to use. Your users have to sift through all the ‘stuff’ that’s being offered to them and choose your thing.
Capturing the needs and behaviours of users, and tailoring your concept to this, gives you a much stronger chance of building the solution they’ll embrace, and benefit from.
This blog first appeared on Digital Agenda.
