In a previous post of this series, we brainstormed to create hypotheses about User Personas, Problem Scenarios and Value Proposition. We also created User Stories to drive narrative collaboration about our product.
Here, I’m going to show you how to get out of the building to understand what problems, desires or needs do your users care about. And I’m going to use user personas, which are ways of describing those users, and problem scenarios, which are ways of describing what is actually important to them.
This activity must be time-boxed so we constraint the time we have to push ourselves to focus and experiment and not go astray on extraneous details. Usually these experimentation exercises are called Design Sprints and they are limited to 5 days each. Does this remind you of agile practices?! Before committing to any expensive investment, you take your idea to the market and start experimenting with your hypotheses and creating refined user stories, if not pivoting the whole idea if users show no interest!
To find subjects, you need to go wherever your user does the activity of interest to you. For example, if you are building an app for health and fitness, you need to go to sport clubs or events. Or an app for conference networking, you need to be at a conference! Usually, you will need to interview about 40 – 60 subjects. In some cases you will get less, like 5,10 or 15, which is fine but the rule is the more the better and more accurate information you get about your potential users.
The key thing about this design sprint is to create an interview guide that starts with very general questions and narrow down towards more specific ones. You don’t want to ask your subject: Hey Roland, is it hard to sift through many travel destinations to select your next one?
Roland in this case will definitely answer by “Yes” because this is what subjects always do when you ask them a leading question. On the other hand, if you ask him: Hey Roland, what is hard about finding and filtering travel destinations?
The answer here will be different and Roland will start revealing his pain like: “It is difficult to learn about living standards in each destination and to shortlist places that suit my budget. Second, there is no single online reference where I can learn about all shortlisted destinations and their travel experience. I often need to search for different blogs and websites for almost each destination and read them all and try to kind of quantify what I’m reading to rank the destinations”.
Persona and Problem Scenario Design Sprint
Let’s get to work and create an interview guide for our persona and problem scenario sprint.
Persona Hypothesis
| Theme | Example Questions for TravInfo |
|---|---|
|
Tell me about yourself [in the persona role]? (it helps to get your persona talking) |
Tell me about being a manager and running a team? What do you most and least like about the job? What are the hardest and easiest parts of the job? |
|
Tell me your thoughts about [the focus area]? (Covers the Thinks part of our persona) |
How researching new destinations should ideally be done?
How is it actually done? Why? |
|
What do you see in [the focus area]? (Covers the Sees part of our persona) |
Where do you learn what’s new? What others do? How your friends are doing it? How do you find references or apps to help you with your research? |
|
How do you feel about [the focus area]? (Covers the Feels part of our persona) |
Tell me about the last time you looked for a new destination? What motivates you? What parts of it are the most rewarding? Why? |
|
How do you do [the focus area]? (Covers the Does part of our persona) |
How many sessions do you usually need? How long is that? What application do you use? Why? What websites/content/blogs/magazines do you refer to? Why? |
Problem Scenario Hypothesis
| Theme | Example Questions for TravInfo |
|---|---|
|
How do you currently do [the focus area]? |
Can you tell me about the process of finding your next destination? What is the first thing you do? What happens next?
|
|
What is difficult or annoying about [the focus area]? |
What is hard about learning travel places and attractions that interest you?
What is hard about ranking the most suitable destinations? What is hard about agreeing with your partner on the next destination? |
|
What are the top 5 hardest things about [the focus area]? Note: You can skip this question if you got satisfying answers to the above |
What are the top 5 hardest things about destination planning? |
|
What are the top 5 things you want to do better this time [about the focus area]? |
What are the top 5 things you want to do to make your destination planning better this time? |
|
It can be a lot questions here like why isn’t it that or this? Like if you are curious why the persona did this and didn’t do that. Or why they didn’t use a specific app or website.. etc |
… |
You might notice that there is some overlapping between the questions. This is absolutely fine because people are not like computers and can’t give you complete information from the first time, so you need to approach them with different questions and from different angles to help them recall their past experience and get more engaged in the interview.
So far, we have covered the first day of this design sprint by drafting our persona, problem scenarios and the interview guide. In days 2,3, and 4 your team will go out to meet customers and meet in the 4th day afternoon to consolidate their notes and top learnings.
In the last day (day 5), your team needs to use their findings to refactor the personas, problem scenarios and user stories they have and probably start sketching some wireframes.
Mat Kasem 