Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read
Of late I have been looking into the exact same question, and came up with two interesting approaches. I offer them here in the spirit of adding to the conversation:
- In the book “designing products people love”, the author, Scott Hurff proposes a radically different approach: a process he calls the “sales safari”. Briefly stated, his concern with using user interviews to design solutions or products is that you don’t get to observe actual behavior in user interviews. As he says, it’s the difference between watching a lion in a zoo versus watching it on a safari in the wild — the behaviors are very different. Instead, he recommends observing unedited comments and conversations of users online, a practice he calls the sales safari. The benefit is that the people who are complaining, complimenting or commenting on a product related to the need you are trying to solve , will be more natural and uncensored in their comments and thus give you more real inout, than they would in an articfial construct like a user interview. I have been finding this pretty revelatory.
- A broader approach is “prototyping” , not in the narrow product development sense, but in the sense of developing a practical and hands-on understanding of the problem you are trying to explore. The best exposition I have seen is laid out in the book “Innovating: a doer’s manifesto”, by Luis Perez-Breva, who teaches an innovation workshop at MIT. In this approach you take whatever materials you have on hand to try to replicate any part of the problem, its impact or a proposed solution, and run it by any people you have access to, and the closer they are to your intended audience, the better. As someone without access to valley capital or a lot of resources, I found the approach surgical but highly rigorous, and very effective so far. It helps you quickly learn what is wrong with your understanding, without spending enormous amounts of time or money. Sounds like you are on a great path, wish you all success, thanks for the helpful piece!
