customer-value map: canvas.harvard.edu

This is a digital version of my completed Customer Value Map for canvas.harvard.edu from the perspective of primary end-user, the student. This exercise yielded a few interesting insights, which I’ll touch on briefly in this post.

[Note: no real stickies were harmed in the production of this post…]

Despite having read about the methodology, this was really my first time putting Christensen’s “jobs to be done” framework directly into action. It is both engaging and humbling. It forces you as the designer to go back to first principles and put yourself in the shoes of the user. What is the fundamental thing the user want to achieve? In the case of canvas, I made sure to start as basic as possible — what is my job as a student? To learn. All other jobs were derivative of that first job of learning. Some were functional but supporting jobs such as exchanging data with other students and the professor. Others were personal/emotional, such as feeling in control of my workload.

Despite my attempt to derive all Pains/Gains from these jobs, I still found it difficult to avoid what I think is the most important pitfall of this type of exercise: profiling the customer with an existing solution in mind. It’s only human to “cheat” a little bit, looking at this exercise through the lens of a canvas user, but doing so undermines our ability to do real human-centered-design. For example, I had originally written “engage with peers via discussion forum” as a job to be done, without even noticing that I was writing about a feature of the product itself. Revising this job to something like “connect with peers” is nominally the more human-centered version of this, but I’m also aware that my knowledge of this job is still a product of my previous interaction with canvas’ discussion forum feature. Perhaps a decade ago, we wouldn’t have considered engaging with peers a critical ingredient to learning.

Overall, this was an extremely rewarding exercise, one that could have surfaced many potential fit issues if we were evaluating a poor product. Fortunately for canvas, this exercise showed me how a customers’ jobs-to-be-done — and the resulting gains and pains — can be effectively addressed by products and services, and how to systematically visualize this fit.