Competitive Analysis, Use Cases and Confusion
Over the last several weeks I’ve felt a lot of tension between completing assignments just to complete them and moving my project forward in a meaningful way. For instance, the competitive analysis and use case assignments, while obviously necessary and helpful, required us to have a concrete, definitive idea of what our product is and what it does. Some of us are at that place and have been for a while, but I am not one of them. So this has meant for me that I’ve defined a direction for the sake of the assignment, when I haven’t felt ready or the idea hasn’t been developed enough, only to change course or redefine it in a way that renders the assignment meaningless. When I have made a shift, in the moment I’ve frequently had the thought, okay, now I will go back and do the assignment again for this new direction I’ve chosen. But there’s always another set of assignments due at the same time, which have to take priority.
The assignments have certainly been helpful in revealing major flaws in the particular direction I had chosen. Maybe that was the point? It doesn’t really feel like that was the point, since the assignments have been more about flushing out feature ideas and clarifying goals. I completed the assignments as best I could, but when it came to speaking with confidence or clarity when workshopping these assignments in class, I definitely struggled. I’ve had trouble defending my ideas or had difficulty answering basic questions.
My full-time school and work schedule hasn’t helped this much. Our major assignments are due on Mondays, which means with working during the day and going to class at night (and also sleeping and eating), I just don’t get as much done during the week as I would like. Weekends are when I get everything done, but since it’s all due Monday, I’m often working on things right up until the minutes before they are due.
I don’t mean to blame the assignments or my schedule entirely for this tension I’m feeling. I’ve definitely hesitated many times and worried too much about whether I’m doing something “right” or making the “right” decision. I could have tested previous ideas I was unsure about more, rather than being too afraid of them failing and abandoning them for something else. I could have worried less about reactions from instructors or experts I’ve spoken to. I’ve often found myself paralyzed by insecurity and self-doubt. In turn, I’ve also gotten a lot better at recognizing when I’m in that mindset and knowing what I need to do to dig myself out.
Since I have another assignment to to check off the list (posting evidence on this blog that I’ve completed all assignments by 11:59pm tonight), I’m going to dedicate the remainder of this post, and at least one more to follow, to writing retroactively about assignments I completed, a competitive analysis and use cases, but shifted away from before I posting them at the time.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
At the time I developed my competitive analysis, I had shifted from a restorative justice-inspired messaging platform to a framework for designing social media interfaces with restorative justice principles. My working value proposition at the time was as follows:
Roundup is a framework for creating more humane social media experiences. For both users and designers of social media platforms, Roundup draws from restorative practices to identify strategies for social media use and design that prioritize our relationships over business interests and profit.
To my knowledge there weren’t any other frameworks dedicated to this, so I chose other frameworks and toolkits for designing digital spaces, to compare my product to. I assessed each competitor on two areas, structure and content. Structure addressed the organization of the framework, and content addressed the delivery of the framework and the shape of the offering itself.
Here’s the first iteration of my competitive analysis:
When I workshopped this in class with Paula and Margarita, I first shared my working value proposition, because I hadn’t spoken with either of them about my progress recently. They immediately pointed out that I needed to choose one user group for my product, either social media users or social media designers. They also suggested that I add social media platforms as well, like Facebook and Twitter, which would be more direct competitors. This gave me kind of a “duh” moment — obviously they should have been on there! I had spent so much of that week trying to define my framework and make communicating about it digestible, that I had forgotten about the actual content of the framework. What would it propose designers do? How would this be better than existing platforms? What features would propose have would make it better than existing platforms?
USE CASES & 5 E’S JOURNEY MAP
After sharing my use cases and 5 E’s journey map with Paula, Margarita, and then Eric as well, I realized I had done a similar thing with this exercise as well.
Here’s the first iteration of my use cases and 5 E’s journey map:
I described how users would use the framework, not the proposals within the framework. I had definitely gotten ahead of myself by focusing so much on the framework, as if it was a thing independent of what was inside of it. As Eric pointed out, the framework would be the thing I would make after I proved the content of the framework was successful.
CONFUSION
I left this workshop session feeling confused and discouraged. The week prior had been pretty typical — between work and classes I didn’t get as much done on either of the exercises described above during the work week, so I was scrambling to get caught up from the week before and get everything else done that was due in class that day. I was frustrated with myself for spending several hours on those assignments, only to discover that I’d consistently overlooked something pretty big. I also felt like all the time I’d spent in the previous semester mulling over what the thing was going to be, should have been spent conducting more user testing and experiments into adapting restorative practices for digital, not-face-to-face, conversations. I started to worry that maybe I had wasted all of my time. Towards the end of class, I hit a breaking point and crumbled into a mess of tears and I-don’t-know-what-to do’s in front of Paula and Margarita.
DECISIONS
The nature of this stage of the program can make it hard to detach and walk away, but sometimes that’s what you have to do for your sanity’s sake. So for the next two days, I focused on my day job and put my thesis aside. I revisited my framework on Thursday, and focused on refining the recommendations that I could back-up with the experiments and research I had done. Since my experiments and research to date had focused more on restorative circles (as opposed to restorative justice), I decided to focus on how the design of interactions could be guided by restorative circle principles. I also decided to focus only on one social media platform, Facebook. I was inspired by this definition of restorative circles, from Circle Forward:
The Circle is a simple structured process of communication that helps participants reconnect with a joyous appreciation of themselves and others. It is designed to create a safe space for all voices and to encourage each participant to step in the direction of their best self.
Encouraging participants to “step in the direction of their best self,” really resonated with me, because it reminded me again of what Tristan Harris has said about Facebook designing for what users think they want in the moment, which isn’t always the same as the thing that serves them best. I don’t mean to say that Facebook should determine what’s best for everyone, but I do think it’s important to keep in mind that humans are extremely complex and we don’t always act in our own best interest. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s best for ourselves.
I narrowed my framework down to three restorative circle principles: 1.) discussion agreements (similar to a code of conduct), 2.) structured, guided conversation, and 3.) restorative question. I identified problems on Facebook, and proposed ways that each of these principles could be designed into Facebook to solve them.
Here’s the second iteration of my framework, where you can also find further explanation of the principles described above:
