What To Do About Our Users?
Week 4: The Who, What, When, Where, and Why
How things have changed. Last week, we left the studio having made the collective decision to hone in on the decision making space for our summer project. It was the biggest independent choice we had made thus far. By this, Monday we were rethinking the decision.
As a result, we made another collective choice to pivot back towards one of our top contenders: events. Specifically, resource discovery. Think venues, catering, sponsorship, etc. We are still not sure the type of events our product will target or our exact customer, but we are already starting to identify ways to improve upon what exists (or doesn’t exist) in the market.
All of these changes came about as we kicked off the week sitting down with HJ to discuss user research. Quickly, we began to see mounting challenges ahead. The “decision making” space was still so vague: Who would we even call upon to interview as a potential customer? Would we focus on decisions within a certain context, and if so, which one?
We could see ourselves addressing the space properly in six months, not three.
Interviewing potential customers is a big part of the development process here at Made by Many. It helps identify how different types of customers work and where the real solutions may lie. It also requires enough focus to identify relevant participants.
In short, decision making was still too broad and too intangible. We could see ourselves addressing the space properly in six months, not three.
The Interviews
Having chosen to pursue events, the remainder of this week has been validating. In my mind at least, it has become easier for us to push forward and start identifying areas of improvement.
Interviewing users has really helped here. We built our interview model off of both online guides and previous Made by Many experiences, where we:
- Never outright mentioned our potential solutions. The goal was not to restrict the thoughts of our participants with any preconceived ideas.
- Focused on previous challenges to better understand the processes these people have gone through.
- Identified solutions used today to understand where opportunities lie.
In all, interviewing is about honing in on process. The hacks used today highlight the real problems people face, and in turn represent opportunities for a potential product.
And, we have done all of this in a week! We have much to do still, but in five days we drafted an interview script, refined it through practice, and completed seven interviews. Already, we have identified some of the pain points that could be the foundation for our final product. The events space provided us with the tangible structure to get this done.
For now, I think we are all a bit burnt out. In an exhilirating way, interviewing takes a mental toll. Next week our plan is to regroup, identify patterns among the people we talked to, and start prototyping. Stay tuned for another update then!
