Discovering ‘Moments that Matter’ for truly meaningful Data Design
Part of the C°F Data Design Toolkit
When facing a challenging situation, I like to compare things to a rugby game: when you are getting hammered by another team, you are put under stress. The most important strategy to get out of this hairy situation (yes, pun intended) is simplicity: falling back on skills and knowledge that you know and have practiced for years.
At CLEVER°FRANKE, ‘getting hammered’ means the (exciting) challenge of diving into complexity by synchronizing strategy, data, technology and coming up with a creative solution. In rugby, ‘simplicity’ means things like basic ball handling skills, making your tackle and playing the patterns. In our business, this translates to asking the right questions, having the right tools in place and making incremental steady steps towards insights that allow you to come up with creative solutions.
Workflow & Toolkit
To facilitate this, reduce the complexity and still be able to deliver bespoke solutions, we started optimising our process and building our own Data Design Toolkit and workflow. In order to deal with complexity and still be flexible, we believed the key to delivering successful data-driven products and services laid in our project process. What this fundamentally meant was re-thinking all our services and capabilities from a productised service perspective.
This forced us to elaborate on every piece of the process within every task and deliverable and ask ourselves: what are tools that we can create to streamline and systemise our process?
Our end goal was never to productise all our services in a way that these could be offered as standalone microservices. In itself a productised service is nothing new and noteworthy, but thinking from this perspective did give us some great results:
- It forces us to make our process, services and deliverables very clear and tangible to our clients and ourselves;
- It opens up a dialogue with our client about contents rather than form;
- New members of staff are able to quickly onboard on our way of working quickly and efficiently. Even if they have no experience with Data Design, still they have the tools to set them up for success.
With a highly complex project, you want all the necessities to be clear and have patterns in place to play the game. As a designer or technologist, the discoveries you make along the way are unknown at the start, however the steps necessary to do those discoveries are most certainly mappable and clear from the beginning.
Our toolkit provides us with a rigid process to Data Design, yet modular and flexible so we can adapt to change and move quickly. One of our most treasured components in our toolkit is ‘Moments that Matter’, which I would like to share with you today. It is a highly effective and valuable tool for surfacing insights.
About Moments That Matter
To design successful data products and systems, we must first of all understand our audience(s). Simply put, the component helps us identify those critical moments for users or customers in their journey and/or when interacting with touchpoints. It is literally about finding the moments that matter when it comes to making the end-result of a project a success, by providing audiences with the right data and information, in the right format, at the right time.
The format is a simple canvas but going through it with different stakeholders yields very powerful results in the UX and service design process. An upside is that, in contrast with a customer journey, it does not need to be comprehensive or complete before you can start designing. We often find that the moments people identify first, are also the ones with the most priority.
How we apply the tool
1. Prepare
In our stakeholder workshops we first determine the primary audiences and dive deeper into those using empathy maps. We then focus on their particular pains, gains, and jobs to be done. This gets stakeholders thinking about all the potential users (and activates those parts of the brain).
2. Gather moments
Once people have a user (group) in mind, they go through the jobs to be done by that audience, mapping all the specific moments in their typical day, week, month or year. Those moments are usually the ones that tie into the responsibilities or goals and are therefore the ones where a new tool is most likely to have impact and success.
Step by step, we dive deeper into those specific moments using our worksheet template.
3. Share & prioritise
After people have identified and defined the moments, we share results with everyone in the workshop. People may have focused on different audiences or moments, or actually have overlap. Of course, both are fine; either broadening, deepening insights or providing varying degrees of interpretation.
We then group the moments by audience or topic. In some workshops, we try to form a process out of these, which may form the start of a journey map. Interestingly this yields ideas for opportunities to change and improve processes as well. We also look at priorities. Either within the workshop or with the project core team, together we rank the moments in terms of priority.
4. Consolidate and ideate
The next step is to envision together what can be designed for the moments that matter.
When shaping a product or service, these moments help to determine what the key elements of a new proposition should be and are used as a basis for the service blueprint. When building tools that support existing processes, the moments that matter help to determine the product flow, information needs and action possibilities.
Let me share two examples where our Moments that Matter gave some great insights:
Aker — the role of the co-op
For a precision agriculture start-up, we went into the weeds of large-scale farming. Rather than disrupt the industry, our client wanted to enhance the processes currently in place. We discovered that at the start of the year, a grower might plan the entire season together with their co-op. The co-op then manages the field’s yield throughout the year and takes action when required. While we were initially focused on buying ad-hoc analyses and mitigation, we included the option to get scheduled inspections and remedies in one go.
Warner Music Group — precision timescales
Standard music intelligence platforms just offer tracking of all sorts of performance through a single chart and allow you to scroll through time. When going into detail of what data people need throughout the process of releasing new music, we found that different moments require different timescales and intervals. Before release; pre-orders are tracked on a daily basis as this is a predictor of future performance. Upon release, artist managers want almost hourly updates of streaming performance and adoption into playlists. Once the release has been done, they look at week-by-week performance to compare it to other releases or artists. This allowed us to design exactly the right view for every situation, not requiring the user to make time selections themselves. And even in the times of big data, this informed decisions all the way down to data architecture.
Considerations
To close off, here are a few tips and considerations to keep in mind when using the tool:
- Ahead of the workshop, gather some basic understanding of the audiences and processes, so you can ask more detailed questions. As a result, your Moments that Matter will be more specific;
- Keep sufficient time to iterate and discuss. The value of the activity lies here;
- Challenge the workshop participants to go beyond the obvious answers;
- Share and validate the results with stakeholders;
- Reflect on these moments throughout the design process to ensure you stay on track;
- Keep in mind that the results might also be surprising for the participants themselves.
An important constraint of the canvas is that it focuses on improving existing workflows or complementing existing human processes. It uses people’s patterns and habits as a starting point and may change those by adding a new factor into that process. However, it might not lead to ideas that are innovating or disrupting processes enough. Of course, this is not always the objective, and when it is, we have other tools to get there.
Conclusion
Moments that Matter is a really simple yet powerful tool to gather input and focus conversations throughout the course of a project. We find ourselves going back to these initial workshop outcomes months into a project for inspiration, or as a yardstick and goal checking tool for when a project is completed.
Designing with and for data is complex and requires a unique approach and process. However, people remain at the centre of the products and services that we build. When tackling all complexities, Moments that Matter is a powerful angle to depart from, as they come from the hearts and minds of the end users.
In a follow-up we will highlight how we enable more disruptive ideas and design innovative services that emerge from the data. For now, we hope this tool may help you design data-driven products as much as it has helped us do the work we love; designing with data.
