Giving future users a voice in early stage IoT projects

Advantages. approach. challenges

I would like to provide you an overview of why and how we can involve future users in our IoT projects at an early stage. When I talk about future users, this also include those involved in the product lifecycle. Who you should involve in a project at an early stage depends heavily on the project. Further, I would like to highlight the challenges in the process and lay out the reasons why the early integration of future users does not necessarily lead to success. My intention is to provide some guidelines for those who would like to do more user/customer research, but don‘t know how to start or what challenges to expect.

The IT industry is very strong in solving problems. But how do we find out which solutions are really valuable in the long-term? In order to answer this question, we have to understand the needs of our future users. What problems do they have, what is of value to them? However, before we can address those questions, we need to understand the different types of users and their daily challenges.

Ultimately, it is important to plan the product holistically and to understand the needs of everyone involved in the product life cycle. To develop a valuable product we must understand the challenges, motivations and work processes of these people.

Why is an early user integration in a project so promising?
There are many reasons why it makes sense to involve stakeholders early in the project. We reduce the likelihood of our product failing by solving problems before the user has them. We increase the value of our product for various stakeholders and reduce possible hinderances the providers of the product, such as the manufacturers or the installer, could face. Another very important point is that we increase the motivation of our team members to generate a solid product by giving them a better idea of whom they solve the problem for. By involving the users in the project via regular feedback loops, we improve the product step by step and prevent failures.

How do we integrate stakeholders into a project?
We are an IoT Solution Provider and our general client are German medium-sized companies who want to digitize their products. A project starts with an idea and several product requirements .

Of course, there are different ways to involve users in the project. Let me show you to how we do it:

1. Gathering data

• Goal: Define the target groups and know their needs and challenges.
• Approach: Analyze which stakeholders would be involved in the project. A good method for this is stakeholder mapping. It helps to generate an overview and prioritize roles that are particularly relevant. The map should be based on findings drawn from qualitative interviews.
  2. Prepare a discussion guide for the interviews. It is helpful to know the work processes, the everyday life, the challenges, needs, touchpoints and wishes of the user. One interview has an approximate length of 60–90 minutes. A good book on interview questions is “The mom Test“ by Rob Fitzpatrick.
• Potential challenges: Win over all those very busy and relevant stakeholders for interviews. Conduct enough interviews with people in the same interest group so that the data is valid. Reduce the bias.

This is an example for the structure of a stakeholder map.

2. Structure and visualize

• Goal: Identify all relevant need patterns and potentials. Share the knowledge in a way that everybody in the team can quickly understand and empathize with interest groups.
• Approach: There are various ways to convey information in a tangible way. With the representation as “Persona“, the need groups are given a face. This helps to develop the product from their perspective. Methods such as “Service Blueprints“ or “Customer Journeys“ help to make potentials in processes visible. Processes are, for example, the customer experience or the product life cycle. Videos and stories also help to empathize with the stakeholders.
• Potential challenge: Focus on what helps the team most to develop a good product.

3. Ideation

• Goal: Create product use cases and concepts that optimize the value and minimize frustration for different user groups.
• Approach: Use all collected information to identify use cases and create prototypes. There are a lot of methods that can help in this ideation phase (for example „value proposition canvas“,…)
• Potential challenge: Sometimes there are no needs or potentials that fit the initial product idea. In this case, one has to be open minded enough to create something new.

What could prevent the product from being successful even if we integrate the users in an early stage?
I want to focus on four main reasons why the early integration of stakeholders does not guarantee a success.

1. Documents such as personas are not used for the further development of the product after the ideation phase. Also, the integration of the users into the further course of the project is not repeated iteratively.
2. In user research, one sometimes finds out that the initial product idea does not solve any real user problems. Or that there are already good work arounds or products for the particular challenges. At this moment, a lot of courage is needed to reinitialize the project.
3. During the user research process, various challenges exist. The biggest are low budget, little time or insufficiently trained employees. Sometimes the user research is not taken seriously and has no influence on the decisions that are made for a product.
4. I wrote the article from the perspective of an UX designer. If you look at the challenges for users and customers, you can‘t predict the future, but only analyze what challenges they face today. It is therefore important to look at projects at different levels. The user research level, but also a more strategic level, e.g. the “Wardley Map” helps to make the right long-term decisions.

But if we master all these challenges during the early integration of users…
We reduce the likelihood of our product failing.
We increase the value of our products for various stakeholders.
We increase the motivation of our team members to generate a good product.

We need to work together to find good solutions to the right challenges.