BBB hard mode: user discovery _Course 2 week 1 (7/6/2022)
This chapter is merely the documentation of my experience during Course 2 Week 1: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, the discovery phrase of my first hypothetical design project. Even the course stated that we don’t need to interview people at this stage but I decided to take it as an opportunity to solve some real problems for real people and it turned out to be really difficult too.
In the real world, every new product, whether it’s an app or a physical object, follows the product development life cycle: brainstorm, define, design, test, and launch. Instead of Brainstorm or an idea sparked inside some stakeholder’s brain, Sharpen, an online tool that creates randomized design prompts, provided me with this challenge: design a bookkeeping app for your favorite bakery.
Bit fed up with seeing B2C(business-to-customers) e-commerce designs, I decided to try something a bit different, a bit unknown, for example, B2B SaaS (business-to-business software-as-a-service), Bookkeeping (something do with money and math) and Bakery (I am gluten-intolerant and only shop in supermarkets). So , BBB, I pressed the hard mode.
Who is my user?
Before I jump into How to Empathize with the users, I need to find my users first.
The design requirements have three elements: Bookkeeping, app and bakery. Therefore the potential users could be bookkeepers or people who use bookkeeping apps, owners of bakeries or home bakers/hobby bakers.
Note: I used The Essential Guide to B2B Customer Research | by Anne Siig Blond as my guide for initial user search. It offers a holistic and structured approach for user research, especially with perspectives of market and product strategy.
Through my personal network, in one week I finally managed to contact 2 bookkeepers , 4 owners of bakeries/cafes/restaurants, 8 home bakers in Doha, while sadly my posts on FB local home baking groups yielded zero response.
On the WhatsApp app, my user survey questions were answered with disappointing messages. None of above-mentioned potential users used a bookkeeping app before, for different reasons: bookkeeper using bookkeeping/accounting software, owners of bakeries use bookkeepers, and the home bakers use pen and paper or spreadsheets.
Moreover, my phone call with an experienced bookkeeper was informative but discouraging for my design project too. Firstly, double entry bookkeeping for a business needs professional setup and support to produce the correct financial reports. Secondly bookkeeping for a bakery requires certain customization. Thirdly, the B2B SaaS market for bookkeeping/accounting is quite mature and dominated by well established players such as QuickBooks. My google research also found that besides powerful online software, there are many smart apps with differentiated features for freelancers, startups, small businesses, and gradations in functionality priced from 25$/months to almost zero. From a product manager’s perspective it’s a red sea with many sharks chasing existing user groups.
After a week’s turmoil of pondering who my user is, I came to a fork in the road: one path with existing users who use bookkeeping apps and may need a bakery version, while another path with potential users who haven’t used bookkeeping apps and may not hold much interest in bookkeeping at all.
Can’t make up my mind so I decide to order something nice to sweeten the job. I contacted one of my potential users and made a late-night order for some gluten-free rice cakes and milk tea, then pick-up next morning when I will thank her in person for participating in my user survey.
Field Study
The next morning, I was nervous before getting into my baker’s house because of my hidden agenda of a field study. Everyone is busy nowadays, and time is money too. My baker was very busy but also very kind to allow me to stay in the kitchen while she was preparing for next orders. We chatted about her baking journey, daily schedule and problems of home bakery, not like interviewer and interviewee but like friends sharing ups and downs of life. Although the whole conversation was not recorded by voice memo, vivid snapshots are recorded in my memory as follows.
Originally I ordered strawberry Mochi but she found out the inventory ran out of strawberry so pain point №1 is the management of inventory.
She built a niche market with Chinese clients who prefer less sweetened bakery and gluten-free rice cake options. She works all day and has a little time to do bookkeeping before bedtime and her husband helps to put them into the right categories in spreadsheets. Pain point №2: time and learning curve of bookkeeping.
Her friends thought her pricing was a bit low and she started to question if her effort was paid off. She wanted to redesign her menu to prompt high profit/ low-effort products but she needed a statistical report from bookkeeping first. Pain point №3: financial reports to improve business strategies.
During her cooking, sometimes she rummage through pages of scribbles maybe for recipes, cost, orders in a small black notebook. Her ordering system is outdated: the menu is just an image posted on social media groups, and we need to message back and forth for 10 minutes to settle down the correct order. Pain point №4: messy information system.
She started the bakery as a hobby to kill time just one month ago and only shopped in supermarkets for ingredients. She needs suppliers for more specialized ingredients and large quantity orders with lower prices.’ A click away ordering and delivering would be great.’ She suggested. Pain point №5: suppliers.
Eventually I came to understand why most of my home bakers said they don’t do much bookkeeping: they have bigger problems than bookkeeping in their amateur business mode and the traditional way of bookkeeping doesn’t offer them enough value to keep it up. All their pain points are superficial, the fundamental problem is that the user’s mindset is still in the hobby mode rather than the business mode.
It is a hard journey to transform a hobby into a valid business. One of my previous interviewees, a senior restaurant owner, shared her successful story of transition. She learned bookkeeping by herself to save money and built a business from scratch. One memorable remark is that it took her three years to fully grasp bookkeeping/accounting, payroll, tax, etc., how she wished she could get some help to shorten this learning curve.
At the end of my field study, I made up my mind that I really wanted to design a bookkeeping app to help, an inclusive UX design for an underrepresented group of users like them. When I told her my plan, my user cheered:’ Do it quickly, I really need something like that!’
That is the story of how I found my focus user group for BBB: Begin_Book_Bakery.
Problematic Persona
After my emotional user discovery and survey phrase, the next assignment in GUXDCC is to create Personas: Fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users.
I had a big problem with this definition and Persona templates in external resources.
For training purposes, GUXDCC provides some fictional bio for students to distill information into a Persona template. From choosing the face image to faking demographic information like age, education, more and more confusion rose up and obscured the purpose of creating Persona. We were told not to make assumptions in user research, the finding needs to be scientific without bias. Now I am making a ton of assumptions influenced by biases and stereotypes in Persona.
Even Google is using stereotypes in its coffeehouse example: one Persona who always does coffee orders for colleges is a female intern less than 25 year old. The devil wears Prada?
GUXDCC’s template is still a Lean version, some templates from professional websites have even more fluff including fancy metric bars such as 5 behaviors, 4 motivations. I wonder how this kind of scaled data is collected in user research or just assumption/interpretation from the UX researcher? How could a user persona filled with irrelevant assumptions align a cross-functional team in the real world?
‘ Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on actual data collected from multiple individuals. Personas add the human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in your research. ‘
A quote from Personas — A Simple Introduction | Interaction Design Foundation irritated me.
I want to retort with my version of Persona, the takeaway of my user discovery phrase:
My persona is real people under an avatar. Only in this way, I can truly empathize with my persona, a memorable combination of real people not cold data. The purpose of creating different personas is to focus on individual persons’ needs in common and at the same time accommodate the differences. Less is more, simple is pure.
