© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

Module 2 – Product Visioning

Table of Contents

Module 2 – Product Visioning................................................................................................... 1 Study Guide .................................................................................................................................................... 2

Reading ...................................................................................................................................................... 2 Assignment ................................................................................................................................................ 2

Module Overview .......................................................................................................................................... 2 Outline ....................................................................................................................................................... 2 Learning Outcomes .................................................................................................................................... 3

User Research and Personas ......................................................................................................................... 4 Uncovering New Opportunities Through Human-Centric Design.............................................................. 4 Understanding Ethnography ..................................................................................................................... 4 Gathering Insights ..................................................................................................................................... 6 Designing a User Study .............................................................................................................................. 6 Creating Personas ...................................................................................................................................... 7

Crafting a Product Vision ............................................................................................................................... 9 Creating the Right Solution Space ............................................................................................................. 9 Prioritizing Your Ideas .............................................................................................................................. 10 Building a Vision with Lean Canvas ......................................................................................................... 10

Summary ...................................................................................................................................................... 12 References ................................................................................................................................................... 13

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

Study Guide

Reading

Required:

• Course module content

• Pichler, 8 Tips for Creating a Compelling Product Vision

Recommended:

Rubin, Chapter 17, Envisioning

Assignment

Individual Assignment: Persona Design & Visioning

Module Overview

Before we get to delivering our project, we need a way to define what it is and who it’s

important for. In this module, we’ll build on user-centric design through a discussion of user

research techniques that you can use. As an outcome of our user interviews or studies, we’ll

create personas, a hypothetical representation of important users. Once we’ve developed a

good understanding of our target audience and crafted our personas, we can narrow in on a

solution to meet their needs, and create a vision statement that articulates what we’re going to

build for them.

Outline

• Understanding how user research works

• Techniques for gathering insights

• Designing your own user study

• Crafting personas

• Defining and prioritizing different solution ideas

• Selecting an idea and creating a vision statement

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

Learning Outcomes

The expected learning outcomes for this section of the course are:

• Understanding how user research fits into product and solution development

• Gaining the ability to design your own user study

• Using personas to shape the design of your product

• Evaluating solution ideas with through a user-centric lens

• Creating a vision statement to create shared understanding of what will be developed

and why

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

User Research and Personas

Uncovering New Opportunities Through Human-Centric Design

One of the best ways to start defining your solution space is to understand how humans behave

in that environment. We do that by creating empathy with our users: Understanding their point

of view instead of evaluating the situation from our own perspective.

We conduct user studies to understand human behavior through observation and exploration.

These user studies are a type of ethnographic research (the study of human social life and

culture) that helps us see how our users actually behave, not how we think they behave or how

they tell us they behave. The process of observation provides us with great insights that help us

identify unmet needs and opportunities.

As an example, when photocopiers began to be installed in businesses, researchers found that

the copy room wasn’t just a place to copy documents (Links to an external site.)Links to an

external site., but became a hub for employees to socialize. This led to additional studies and

implications for designing better physical environments to encourage employee engagement.

When we observe our users, we often uncover behaviors that we didn’t anticipate.

Additionally, human-centered design helps us create solutions that solve problems for real

people, and we engage them as active participants during the process. This helps us design and

build more usable, viable solutions that people want.

Check out this video short from design firm IDEO on the value of human-centric design.

VIDEO: IDEO: Human-Centered Design: Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation

https://youtu.be/musmgKEPY2o

Understanding Ethnography

The study of humans in their environment is called ethnography. The purpose of ethnography is

to understand the complexity of people’s experience, including behaviors, attitudes, goals,

motivations, and strategies. Through that discovery process, we identify areas where we can

improve the design of our solutions.

While some large technology companies have teams of ethnographic researchers, more

commonly you'll find informal ethnographic practices applied to understanding user experience

and behavior.

As we consider the user experience through user observation, we evaluate that experience

based on four core ethnographic principles:

Natural Settings

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

We study the activities of people in the context of how they conduct the activity in their

environment. For example, if we want to understand how a person performs their work, we sit

with them and observe how a task is performed.

Holism

We evaluate how the user’s task or interaction fits into a broader context. Let’s say that you’re

conducting a study on how people use your company’s software application. What was

happening before they started to use the software? What happened after?

Description

Very often people behave differently that you might expect. They might deviate from training

that has been provided, or they may have found a completely different use for your product or

service. As you observe, document the actual behavior, not what you think should or ought to

happen. Remain objective and non-judgmental on the user’s process.

Point of View

As an observer, it’s your job to objectively assess your user’s world. Identify ways to see the

interaction scenario from their point of view. Don’t impose your way of thinking on them during

the observation process.

As an example, the vodka company Absolut contracted with an ethnographic firm to "infiltrate

American drinking cultures" to better understand how people consume alcohol at home

parties. The goal was to identify group rules and rituals that govern drinking habits. The

company knew that people were buying their vodka, but wanted to understand the context of

how it was consumed. As a premium liquor, was Absolut treated as a special liquor (used only in

fancy cocktails) or was it consumed the same way as non-premium brands. Throughout the

research process, the ethnographers uncovered common themes. "Someone comes in with a

bottle. She gives it to the host, then the host puts it in the freezer and listens to the story of

where the bottle came from, and why it's important." Yet when the liquor is served, it goes on

the same table with all the other bottles. The finding was that the narratives that accompany

the premium brand are consistently more important than the liquor itself. "We found that

there is this general shift away from premium alcohol, at least as it's defined by price point,

toward something that has a story behind it." The takeaway for Absolut was that marketing its

brand around "chemistry lab purity" was missing the mark for consumers. Read the full

article here.

Cultural context is critical as well. Different cultures have different value structures and beliefs.

What works well in one culture may not translate to another.

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

Gathering Insights

Now that we understand a little more about the role of ethnography in understanding our users

in their environment, let's take a look at different ways that we (as non-professional

ethnographers) can gather insights. There are many techniques that we can use to understand

how our users behave, ranging from qualitative (subjective - how something feels) and

quantitative (objective - how we measure) approaches.

Qualitative research involves the process of observation and exploration with our users.

Specific activities that we might employ within qualitative research include observation, focus

groups, and user interviews. These techniques help us understand the underlying reasons,

opinions, and motivations (the “why”) behind human behavior. The limitations of qualitative

research are time, effort, and scale. If your product has a large and disparate user base, it may

be difficult to conduct qualitative studies.

Another commonly used approach is quantitative research. In quantitative research, we are

gathering data that can be transformed into metrics that provide insight into how our users

actually use our product or service. Techniques include surveys or user interaction statistics

gathered from application usage. Web analytics is a good example of this.

It’s not an either/or approach: Most organizations use a combination of these methods to

better understand their users.

Designing a User Study

Depending on your project, you may capture user experience insights through conversations.

For larger initiatives, you might want to plan out a more formal user design study.

When we study people in their environments, we can focus on generating good outcomes for

our users, not a list of features. Through this investigation process, we’ll find gaps in our

knowledge and understanding of what’s important to our users.

User studies can be conducted at any time, but in a Design Thinking framework, we do them

before we start to identify solutions (and revisit those assumptions as we continue along the

design process). The insights that you’ll uncover through the user study process will likely lead

to shifts in how you understand your users (or potential users), which will influence your

designs.

As you’re designing your user study, consider how you want to interact with your users. You

might want to take a purely observational approach or conduct a more in-depth interview. Here

are some approaches:

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

• User field tests that incorporate usability testing with interviewing. In this process, you

interview people about their tasks and pain points, adapting questions through the

conversation.

• Conducting customer visits helps you understand usability issues or differences in

business context at different geographic locations.

• Direct observation allows us to understand how users actually work and interact.

• Group research provides insight into users’ mental models and social situations

(including cultural context and context of use) that can help identify how products and

services fit into people’s lives.

Once we’ve defined our user study objectives and approach, we can begin to engage with our

users to understand their “day in the life” - who they are and what’s important to them.

Information that you’re gathering in this process will include your impressions, observations,

how someone works or performs an activity in the flow of their day. We’ll use our user study

results and findings to create personas.

Creating Personas

Once we've collected the insights from our user study, we'll use that information in two ways.

As you've engaged with and observed your users, you've likely uncovered several areas where

you could design solutions to address specific needs or desires. We want to capture those

opportunities as areas to explore solution design in the design thinking process. The second

purpose of the information is to create something called a persona. A persona helps us model,

summarize and communicate research about our intended users. A persona is depicted as a

specific person but is not a real individual; it’s a role pulled together based on your

observations. Personas help the organization and product team visualize specific groups of

people as opposed to viewing your product development as a “one size fits all”

approach. Personas provide a framework for describing the target audience in a way useful

to solution design. Most importantly, they bring the users of our product or service to life and

serve as the “voice of the user” throughout the design process.

The first step in our persona design is to give our persona a name and some general profile

information, such as age, occupation, and location. Find an image of someone who represents

that profile. As a best practice, avoid using celebrity names and images as they can be

distracting, remember that we’re trying to foster empathy for our users and we want to make

them as realistic as possible.

Each persona includes a description of their needs, concerns, and goals. We’re not trying to

document every aspect of our persona’s life, but instead are focusing on the potential

interactions and responses a user might have to our solution design. Depending on your user

research and spectrum of solution options, you will likely have multiple personas. When

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

considering how many personas to create, focus on attributes and user scenarios that are

unique. Generally, only one or two target personas will be considered for your initial solution

design.

Common pieces of information to include in the persona are:

• Name, age, gender, location, and an image (which makes your persona more

memorable)

• A tag line that describes them

• Their level of experience in your solution space

• Context for how they would interact with the solution: Is it a choice or is it required?

What’s the usage frequency? How would they access your solution?

• An outline of goals and concerns when they perform relevant tasks within the solution

domain: speed, accuracy, thoroughness, or any other needs

• A quote that exemplifies the persona’s attitude

Avoid adding too much detail that doesn’t add value to your solution design. Keep each

persona to a single page. If information you’ve captured isn’t necessary for design

considerations, leave it out of the persona. For example, if you’re designing a retail shopping

application, you probably don’t care if your user drives a fancy car, but that information might

be useful if you were designing a shopping application for a high-end retailer as the fancy car

might be an indicator that the persona has extra discretionary income and likes expensive

things. Behavioral attributes such as efficiency or speed would be important in understanding

the user’s expectations.

Quite often you will discover outlier (or extreme) personas in your research. These may be

users who are very distinct from your “average” users. Typically, you’re creating solutions that

meet the needs of your broadest target audience. However, it can be useful to capture extreme

personas if the user group is influential or if you want to use them to create outlier scenarios

and test cases once you get to the solution design phase.

What happens if you have an innovation idea and no existing customers? Ideally, you’ve already

done your market research and you have an idea about who your target customer is. In that

case, you can build up hypothetical persona(s) to start with and validate your assumptions over

time.

VIDEO: Check out this video for an overview of the persona design process:

https://youtu.be/B23iWg0koi8

Additional resources:

• “Goal-Directed Design: An Interview With Kim,” Christine Perfetti, User Interface

Engineering

• “Perfecting Your Personas,” Kim Goodwin, Cooper Journal

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

• “Getting From Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data,” Kim Goodwin,

Cooper Journal

• “Putting Personas Under the Microscope,” Suzy Thompson, Cooper Journal

Crafting a Product Vision

Creating the Right Solution Space

As we’ve gone through the design thinking process, we’ve expanded on the “job to be done”

for our customers and have broken through our typical solution-centric design constraints.

From your customer journey maps, you’ve increased your understanding of the “job to be

done.” You’ve identified a number of possibilities (hypotheses or concepts) to create new

solutions, products or services for your customers, and where those fit into the customer value

chain.

Our challenge is to break away from the design constraints inherent in our standard

organizational development processes. If we’re always thinking about the way we’ve always

done things, we’re never going to come up with any really innovative solutions (it’s easier to

say why we can’t do something than why we can). Our goal is to enable pathways to a new

future. Per Ogilvie & Liedtka (2011) in their design work with customers, “the creativity that

really matters lives in how the new future was accomplished, not what it looked like” and

“there are few incentives to creativity more powerful than being told that you cannot have your

own way.”

Creating a new solution space for your ideas doesn’t just require creativity, but discipline. Check

out this video on becoming a great game designer - a great metaphor for all of the skills we

need to bring our ideas through the ideation-to-execution process:

VIDEO: So You Want to Be a Game Designer: Career Advice for Making Games (7:35)

https://youtu.be/zQvWMdWhFCc

What we’re doing is stepping back from the “critical reasoning” process, where we break down

concepts to evaluate what won’t work and shifting towards building up ideas to understand

how they could work.

However, constraint-limited design doesn’t mean that we don’t consider feasibility; and we still

need to evaluate and prioritize our concepts by going through some thought experiments to

better develop and refine the business case.

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

Prioritizing Your Ideas

The mantra around innovation is for every 1,000 ideas, there are 100 good ideas, 10 great

ideas, and 1 exceptional idea. How do we start narrowing our list down?

By this stage in the process, you’ve identified a number of ideas that your team could move

forward with. Let’s look at some ways that we can prioritize the list of ideas by balancing

innovation points across business, technology, and people. We need consider whether our

ideas are desirable, viable, and feasible.

IBM’s design practice advocates the following approach for idea selection. Start the

prioritization process with your design team, and consider including resources who can speak

to the overall importance of the idea to the business as well as technologists who provide

guidance on feasibility.

Set up a virtual team space or whiteboard and draw two axes, one for importance to the user (Y

axis: desirability; low to high) and another for feasibility and viability (X axis: difficult/expensive

to easy/inexpensive).

Have each team member evaluate each idea on their own, bring the results together, and plot

on the whiteboard. If there is disagreement about where an idea fits, have a time-boxed

discussion about it. When considering desirability, focus on your users, not your stakeholders.

Once the ideas are all on the board, see which ideas fell into the “big bets” category as a

starting point for discussion. These are the ideas that will take some work to get done but will

have a bigger payoff. While it might be appealing to go after the “no brainers” first, these are

ideas that might have a lower business or market impact (if they’re easy for you to do, then

they’re probably easy for your competitors as well). However, that doesn’t mean they’re not

worth considering. For “utility” ideas, you might briefly discuss how to make them more

impactful to your users. Avoid deep discussion on “don’t do it” items.

At the end of your session, evaluate your short list and select the top idea that the team wants

to move forward with. If you have a larger team participating in the design thinking initiative,

you might select several ideas to move forward with and break out into sub-teams.

Looking for an alternative prioritization approach? Check out Pandora's prioritization process:

Getting to 70 million users with just 40 software engineers!

Building a Vision with Lean Canvas

Once we’ve identified the idea that we’re going to move forward with, the next step is to

compose the vision statement. The vision outlines the overarching goal that aligns your team to

the importance of the work, and helps create a shared understanding of the overall objectives

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

of your idea from both an organizational and customer perspective. Best of all, creating a vision

statement helps ensure that we’ve thought through our idea related to our desirability,

feasibility, and viability.

While there are many different vision boards and tools that you can use, a recommended

starting point is Lean Canvas. Developed by Ash Maurya and built off of business model canvas,

Lean Canvas provides a simple (and fast) way to structure your idea around nine foundational

areas.

• The problem: What are the crucial problems faced by your consumers?

• Your solution: What solution are you recommending to address this problem? What are

the defining elements of the solution and how does it address your customers’

problem? What alternatives do customers have to your solution?

• Unique value proposition: The value proposition is a summary that outlines what you’re

developing, why it’s different, and why someone should invest in your solution.

• Differentiators: Who are your competitors? What sets your solution apart from the

competition?

• Customer segments: Draw from your personas. Who is your target audience?

• Channels: How do you anticipate interacting with your consumers, creating awareness

and support?

• Key metrics: How will you track the success of your solution?

• Cost structure: What will it cost to launch and maintain your solution?

• Revenue streams: How will your solution generate revenue?

Your Lean Canvas vision draws on all of the insights and information you’ve gathered in your

previous work. It’s an iterative document, so the team can build on it and adapt as needed. Get

together with your team to complete the vision; spend less than an hour on your first pass.

As you work through your Lean Canvas, create a vision statement that sums up your idea in a

single sentence. Establishing a product vision is a critical component of the project initiation

process. The vision provides the overarching goal that aligns the project team to the

importance of the work, and helps create a shared understanding of the overall objectives of

the project from both an organizational and customer perspective.

A good vision statement communicates the purpose and value of the project. It provides team

members with direction and shapes customer understanding. A vision statement for this class

might read: “To provide Boston University students with a core understanding of agile delivery

approaches so that they can utilize them within their own organizations.” A statement like this

helps guide the development of the course content and the materials. The vision statement

doesn’t expressly specify how this will be accomplished, but frames the problem statement in

terms of a business goal. The “how” would be captured once you started defining

requirements.

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

Here’s an example Lean Canvas for building out a Design Thinking program in an organization.

Our unique value proposition:

To provide employees with a core understanding of Design Thinking approaches through a

virtual learning environment to facilitate the innovation ideation process.

The Problem The Solution Differentiators Customer Segments Channels Key Metrics Cost Structure Revenue Streams

There is a broad

interest within the

organization to

generate innovation

ideas. Design

Thinking (DT) has

been proposed as a

framework for

structuring ideas.

There are no

internal DT

resources currently

available within the

company.

The solution is to

create a short

course on DT that

can be offered

internally.

The course will be

structured in a

virtual format

allowing for global

participation with

no travel expenses.

Employees can

access external DT

resources, but those

resources don’t

always do a good

job of preparing

employees to

become

practitioners.

Participants will

practice

experiential-based

learning approaches

where they use the

DT framework to

solve for real

organizational

innovation

opportunities.

All DT content can

be tailored for the

organization’s

specific needs.

Our target

segments for the DT

course are (from

the personas)

Practitioners:

Employees who

want to use, teach

or evangelize DT in

their own work

environments

Knowledge Seekers:

Employees seeking

general knowledge

for personal or

professional

development

So that we can

concurrently

practice and learn,

our first course

offering will be run

as a pilot with

recruiting done on a

volunteer basis.

As the pilot

progresses, we will

initiate an

awareness

campaign more

broadly within the

organization

through internal

communication

channels to gauge

demand for future

course offerings and

schedule.

Qualitative

measures of success

for the solutions will

include:

Employee

engagement and

satisfaction

Idea generation

Toolkit reusability

Quantitative

measures of success

for the solutions will

include:

Idea viability and

funding

Development of the

solution requires:

Course content

development

Access to learning

management

platform

Employee on-the-

job time (~4 hours

per week)

The first two

resources are

available to the

organization at no

charge. Managers

must make the

determination on

whether to allow

for employee

participation.

Since the course

requires little to no

financial

investment, a

revenue stream is

not required.

However, since a

time investment is

necessary, an

“engagement

stream” (employees

interested in

attending and

perception of value)

is needed to ensure

the longer-term

viability of the

course.

Summary

The best way to define your solution space is to understand how people behave in that

environment. Through the user research process, we developing an understanding of that

behavior from the person’s perspective. There are many different ways to conduct user

research and understand behavior patterns, from qualitative interviews to qualitative

assessments. As an output of the research process, we create personas to help us retain the

perspective of our users and focus on what’s important to them. Once we understand the

solution space from our users’ point of view, we can narrow in on solution options, selecting

ideas that provide user and organizational value. Creating a vision statement with Lean Canvas

helps us articulate what we’re going to develop and why.

© 2018 Rachel Alt-Simmons, Boston University, All Rights Reserved

References

Ogilvie, T. & Liedtka, J. (2011). Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers.

New York, NY: Columbia Business School Publishing