Using JTBD to Design a better voting experience for the Kalasha International Film Awards: Part 1
In my previous post — How a 20-year-old Framework can refine your product development — I explained the essence of the Jobs To Be Done(JTBD) framework and how to apply it — mostly from a ten thousand foot view.
Today I’ll go deep into the practical use of the framework to increase product adoption, by knowing what job your users are trying to do and how to build on it. I will link the motivation, situations, and outcomes together in an interface to show how you can go about it.
Our Current Predicament
It’s the last quarter of the year and the Kalasha International Film Awards are around the corner. Films and actors have been submitted for nomination under various categories and the Kenya Film Commission invites the public to vote for their nominees.
A friend who happens to have a drama out sends me a link via a Whatsapp group I’m in to vote for her film. The link resembles this format(https://t.co/6wxcKZeP7Y?amp=1) and there’s no telling where it’ll lead to at first glance, given the lack of a legible domain name. I click on it…. my anticipation builds… and what loads up on my phone…..
I vote for her, and try to submit the form. To my frustration, I have to select a contestant from EACH of the 29 categories listed. Patiently I guess my way through the nominees and finally, I submit the form.
Instead of diving head first into bashing the voting mechanism employed by the Kenya Film Commission, let’s explore why it seemed like a reasonable choice for them.
- It’s a great low-cost way of solving the getting the job done. They need to gather data from the public and they’ll do it the best and most objective way they know how.
- No long tendering process for a system. The form in its simplicity doesn’t require a long tendering process to build some fancy voting system with flashy pictures, drama bios, awesome cover photos it just does the job. It collects the users’ opinions on who they like by giving them the most basic unit of information about that particular asset — their name, the program and that’s it. Pretty nifty if you ask me.
- It proves that the people voting are human. Given that it’s a Google form, you can only use it if you have a Google account. This adds a 98% assurance that the person voting is human (the 2% accounts for evil bots that may be employed to simulate the same). This adds to the integrity of the results.
Jobs To Be Done Thought Process to the Rescue
If my consulting firm — Valiancy — was contracted to build the next version of this solution, we would have followed the simple steps below to help us use the JTBD framework.
- Start with the high level job
- Identify smaller jobs which help resolve the high level job
- Observe how people solve the problem now (the tool they currently use).
- Come up with a Job Story to investigate the causality, anxieties and motivations of what they do now.
- Create a solution which resolves that Job Story.
1. Start with the high level job
The high-level job of this solution is to accurately represent the participants of the awards in a positive light and give fans the opportunity to express love for their favorite shows/personalities.
Currently, the form does the core part of giving the participants a chance to get voted for by their fans but it doesn’t portray them as best as it could. Many fans may not recognize names of their favorite actors but would know their faces instead.
Contextual uses where a person is voting for only one or two people haven’t been well thought out. You have to fill out the entire form(which is really long) just to vote for 1 person.
2. Identify a smaller job which helps resolve the high level job
A user needs to select a show or actor they love, prove that they’re human and finish voting for that person.
NB: The stopper where people have to vote for everyone is more of a technical imposition of the form rather than a requirement. Remember, we’re keeping our minds on the job here.
3. Observe how people solve the problem now (the tool they currently use)
The following is a thread where I got the link and these are some real reactions to the current solution.
We clearly see that people are voting, contestants are represented, but because they have to fill out everyone’s name, they are forced to LIE when choosing actors/films in categories they don’t know.
This poses a huge integrity problem to the final results for the owners of the form (Kenya Film Commission) and contestants. The probability of someone getting undeserved votes is real.
The current solution is also closed up to people who have Google accounts only. This may be a negotiable issue given the high Android Smartphone penetration in Kenya but it’s an issue which can’t be glossed over.
One other thing to note is how, the contestants are garnering votes, they’re using social media platforms and sharing through mobile. This automatically implies that this form will be opened and filled in by a mobile communication device.
When you couple this reality with the mandatory selection of a person from the 29 categories in the form, where each has at least 4 options to evaluate and the cognitive load on the user is too much. Drop off rates at the sight of the form will probably be high.
4. Come up with a Job Story to investigate the causality, anxieties and motivations of what they do now
Framing the current situation in a job story we will say:
- When fans want to vote for a contestant…
- They will visit the google form presented to them where they’ll search for their contestants category and select the contestant…
- And fill out every other category as well…
- So that they can submit their vote to Kenya Film Commission.
If we were to give a context where a fan doesn’t have a Google account, we’d say that
- When fans want to vote for a contestant…
- ….They will visit the google form presented to them where they’ll be asked to sign into Google…
- And fill out every other category as well…
- …So that they can search for their contestants category and vote for their contestant.
Framing the current solution as a job story and adding context already surfaces the pain points to be solved.
5. Create a solution which resolves the job story
This is the point where the team at Valiancy decided to come up with the following considerations:
- A user has to have the capability to vote for just one person and not be forced to vote for people they don’t know or like
- The user has to be able to vote only once, so some form of human proof will be required to ensure results are real
- The user could use more contextual information on who the contestant they are voting for is:
- For an actor that would be: Their name, the category being voted for and their picture. Additional information would be movies they’ve acted to help the users gauging their practical performance and know more about their work.
- For a movie/drama/animation that would be: Its name, its category, the cover photo of the movie, the main actors in the movie and the director. Additional information would be a brief 200/160 word synopsis of the movie to ensure that the fan can gloss through and make a quick voting decision.
Take time and soak in those points for now. In my next article, I’ll give detailed and contextual wireframes of what the potential interface would look like.
To learn more about the Jobs To Be Done Framework, you can checkout the following resources:
- Intercoms book: https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done
- A talk from Intercom discussing how they adopted this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNTW_9mFM7k
- Jobs To Be Done application in marketing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0NRo3yLqxM
- An in-depth talk of how Jobs-To-Be-Done can be used as a framework for Disruption(actual name of the talk, not an article buzzword): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBRw38Y06No
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