Now for this Workshop, we're going to create our assumptions in our hypotheses
around a hypothetical business problem.
And that project is called, Neo calling.
Neo calling is a company that is looking to
revolutionize, online conference calling and real-time media
sharing.
And they have a vision statement because every project in every product should start with a vision
statement that the team buys into and this is Neo callings
vision statement. Their goal is to idiot-proof conference calling
and real-time media sharing and they believe that
they will succeed by streamlining the onboarding
process.
By limiting the features available to customers.
And by ensuring the highest quality conversation, that's what they believed to be true.
And so we as a group are going to work to understand what
assumptions are being declared here. And when hypotheses we can write
as a team
To test the assumptions declared in this vision statement.
The first part we're going to work through.
Our personas, who are we building products for? Who are we going
to build a product for Neo calling
Now the way the personas fit into the lean ux process,
is the lightweight or the ad hoc Persona sometimes, you'll hear
these called proto-pesona 'z. Now you have the option to go out and do six months
worth of ethnographic research, it to come back with a report
but you'll have to wait for that work to get done. You'll have to pay for that work. You
have to read and digest that work before you can move forward with our
preference for Learning. And for making, we are going to declare
our assumptions about who
We believe, we are building this product for.
And then we're going to go out and find these people.
And validate our assumptions and test our assumptions, whether or not these people actually
exist, and these personas are a model of what we know today. So, as of
today, what do we know about our perceived target audience, and
because their rapid and iterative and paper-based, there are
low investment. And so, if we find out that we're wrong, they're
easy to fix.
It's not a lot of, there's not a lot of financial investment or time investment in these
upfront and they get refined and optimized over
time.
And so the makeup of the proto-pesona has four components to
it. The top left-hand corner is simply a name in a sketch. It just
gives us a wrapper to put around this in a name to call this particular persona.
The top right corner is demographic and psychographic information
about our target audience.
This is demographic and psychographic information that is only relevant
to the way. This customer would interact with our
product. So for example, if the breed of
dog that they own is relevant to the way that they wouldn't
interact with a conference calling service, that's important and that goes here.
But if it's irrelevant
Then it doesn't need to go there. Only the things that would affect the way that they
would use our product or service need to go in that top right-hand box.
Now the real meat of the personas down in the bottom half and I'm left side, we talked about
that particular, customers pain points, and their needs. What are the
challenges that this customer has in our
domain in our space? And on the right hand side, we talk about
how we're going to address those needs. Now that could be
that could be features or it could be broader statements about an approach or a vision
statement. But our goal is to start to think about how we can apply these
needs.
Our goal is to create personas for Neo calling.
And so together as a team, we're going to create two
personas that could potentially use an online conference calling
and media, sharing service. And so the way we're going to do this, I'm going to facilitate this
exercise and you guys are going to help me out. The first thing I want to
do is a team is, I want us to get an understanding together about who we
think could potentially use an online conference calling
and media sharing service. The type just generally broad level, who are
the types of people.
Could potentially use that service, just call them out executive.
Exactly. Yeah. What else?
Who else?
We're teens were teams, like does it distributed teams and low? Or I can see
both, but certainly, every time is distributed these days at least a little bit like a distributed
teams. Okay, local and
distributed, what else science clients? Okay,
can you be a little bit more specific? It's a little bit broad. Um,
I'm I'm thinking more of your, the
not necessarily the business but the people that the business is dealing with
Business has that business deal with clients and customers, okay? So a local
customers, maybe we can dig in a little deeper into that in a second. Who else?
Salespeople salespeople?
Who
else customer support? Customer support, perfect.
What else?
Who else uses online calling services and media sharing services?
Families families. Very good.
Couple more.
Long distance relationships on distance relationships. That's a great one.
Since relationships are not a person. I'm going to say long-distance lovers for
this. What else? One more. Let's do one more recruiters.
Very good.
Anybody else? Any other thoughts?
Okay, so our first exercise
was simply to brainstorm a bunch of potential target
audience members.
Our next exercise is to figure out who we want to focus on
first.
And so we've diverged very quickly and now we're going to converge. And what we
want to do is a team is pick two to fairly different ones
so that we, so that we can discuss the different needs for the to
that. We'd like to work on First and what I'd like you to keep in mind during this initial prioritization
exercise is that, it doesn't mean that the six or seven that
we don't pick are bad ideas, it just means we're going to
pursue those first two customer types first, and if they don't
work out,
Don't exist, or they don't have a need for our service. We've got this terrific, backlog of ideas to
go back to and say, you know what? Long-distance lovers didn't work out, we should focus on
sales people,
Now, in many situations, you may have a product owner or a product manager
who makes this prioritization decision for you or you may come
together as a team to say, we believe that focusing on these two people
first, what makes a lot of sense. So as a team who do you guys want to work on, let's pick two
that are fairly diverse for the for the sake of the exercise that we'd like,
that. We think could be big adopters of our online conference calling
and media sharing service.
You guys want to work?
Call went out its work teams and maybe families or teams again for teams and
Families.
What else salespeople salespeople, I think work teams and
families can all can almost be too similar. Okay,
why do you say that? Because I think if you're working on a team you're familiar with your
team and the same way that you're familiar with your family and you've you kind of
try to but you try to work together the same way of I guess a
family would work together, okay? This is
the emphasis in the vision statement and while I
Probably identify a number of assumptions there, but they're there was an emphasis in
there about trying to simplify the experience and often times if you
have at least proceed differentiation for your business, you want to choose
a segment that sort of has a problem that uniquely
aligns to that it can't solve their problem in any other way and sales people spend are a
lot of them who used teleconferencing, Services spent a lot of time using these
tools and have sort of refine them fairly well. I'm
imagining, perhaps,
People like customer support where they're dealing in difficult situations with maybe non-technical
people a tool like this might might be a good fit.
Okay, right. So, go to the place that has the strongest potential
demand, they need. Yeah. And, and, and it's great insight into kind of the
other end of the call equation. Right? So we've got, when you start to think
about these folks, but who are they talking to? Like, what could have could enable them to
do their jobs better? What do you think?
What would you like to focus first? Exactly is. Why executives?
I think that they have a great need for conference calls and they spend a lot
of their time working
talking to people who are not in the same location as there. So, the
need is immediate. Yeah, and they might not be as tech savvy,
perhaps as others. Yeah, memorizing. All those 800
numbers and long pins to get of the call could be a problematic,
anybody else? Yeah. I like I like
Customer support because you have two different types of users at the both ends of the
line. Yeah. Like the norm experience clients probably
and the experience customer service provide
and yeah also families families.
Okay.
So I think in this case we've got a pretty broad so you can see immediately even as a team
we've got a fairly broad distribution of who we'd like to focus on First. And so we need to make a
decision so we can move forward and at least start to validate some of our thinking.
So, for this exercise, I'm going to play the role of the product owner, or at least the decision-maker to move
forward. And so it seems like customer support has a lot of interesting
use cases and by and so, we'll do that one. And let's pick one that's radically
different, or in theory and I think families,
Is probably probably a good one to pick their to try to.
So we'll have to dig into who, which member of the family were talking about. But let's start
there. Okay, so we're going to customer support and families. Now again, it doesn't
mean that these are bad ideas. It just means we're going to focus here. First,
we're going to go and prioritize making over analysis. So let's start with customer support.
Okay?
We're going to draw these personas together. First and
foremost, let's give our customer support person. A name, and it
should be a name of someone that you don't know, and certainly not someone in this room because otherwise,
it starts to take on the Personalities in the traits of that particular person. So,
the name of our
customer support person, pick a name,
Jane, Jane, Jane. It is guys, give a chain
All rights to Jane, and while I
A perfect representation of Jane. If you could tell me how old
you think Jane is,
45 45. Okay.
You guys agree?
Yeah. Okay.
Jane is 45 years old.
And she's our, she's our customer service.
Rep. Okay, let's talk about Jane,
psychographic and demographic.
Profile. What elements are important about the way Jane
works. That would affect the way that she would interact with our service, right? Let's,
let's let's start with perhaps by addressing what industry, she's doing. Customer service for
software, we probably be getting software is a good place to start. Okay, let's yours in
the software industry. Okay, what
else
Education level, for example.
Bachelor's degree bachelor's. What does she have to do? You guys agree. You agree
Bachelors. OK. What does have a Bachelors in does it matter?
Will it affect the way that she uses the service? I
wouldn't think that it would matter because I think sometimes customers
work can be trained on a very focused product.
About that. What else Tech savviness,
things like that, what's important?
She's a smart phone when you guys think.
What's your level of understanding of Technology?
It struck me that that it would have to be significant
enough for her to be able to understand and what customers through
software, right? So having a degree of
Savvy there seems logical. Okay. So
how do we categorize that? So she's Tech savviness to she
talked about her experience with with specific devices. So does she have a
PC at home? My desktop at home?
Sumption is yes. Okay, going to Android / iPhone? Android / iPhone.
Well, I was thinking iPhone / Android because we're using, you know, the
iPhone to communicate with friends but not necessarily for work, okay?
IPhones for friends and
tablet, familiarity at all tablet that you have an iPad or a Nexus or
I've had, I've had for watching movies rights
and what does she do? All the other than the work that she's doing? So, let's
assume that she's specialized. She understands the software that she's working
in other than that. What does she do with her devices from a
tech-savvy perspective? What does she actually use her devices for? So we talked about watching movies,
we talked about communicating with friends, anything else reading reading.
So so,
Entertainment, movies entertainment,
right? That's what she's using technology for mostly, right. Okay.
Maybe news news, right? She's not
She's not doing a software development and she's not heavy user
social media, Facebook, Facebook, write
V, place for all 45 year, olds to hang out these days.
What else? What else is important that she's married or not married?
She has kids or no kids. Is that affect the way that she would use this particular service?
What about the users? Where are the users for her product? They nearby are. They
distributed all over the internationally, nationally,
nationally distributed? Yeah. Okay.
Nationally distributed user base.
What about any, any, any physical constraints, does she wear glasses that she have
any other challenges carpal tunnel?
Reading glasses. Yeah, reading glasses. Okay. Right. These are these are
as you think about the assumptions about your customers might.
Sometimes we forget about the physical challenges. If we're designing for a particular audience
type, sometimes physical challenges, make a big difference in how we design and
solve for their problems. Okay, let's move down here.
Let's move to her needs. So, Jane is a customer service rep.
She's a casual user of Technology. She's intimately familiar with the software that she's
that she's helping support.
And she's a nationally distributed user base, what are her needs when it comes to
communicating with that user base?
Either online or through real-time media sharing, what does she need to do?
Easily connect with her customers easily connect with her customers. Yeah.
What else?
So their concerns in a timely way.
Timely resolution. Yeah.
What else?
How to deal with a broad spectrum of sophistication of our users. Yeah, yeah.
So there's there's a broad
Spectrum.
Of user sophistication.
How does she solve? How does she typically solve people's problems
and is that, is there a need there?
She'd probably need to coordinate between multiple systems coordinate between
multiple systems. Yeah.
Okay, this is implied media sharing, right? So she's either sharing her
own screen or vice versa, decline of sharing their screen, she needs to
share
screens.
There's also existing tools that allow.
People to take over other people's computers and I might be an expectation that she has control over the
users systems.
Are we assuming that the context of use for her is strictly
limited to desk based?
I'm asking I wish it were taking a guess so we can take whatever guess
we want at the moment. But is our assumption is because she's customer
service that she's doing this from a desk, whether it's a home office or it's a,
yes, okay,
I don't know that we can make that same assumption about the users, of course, right? Okay,
so so what does that mean?
Particularly, if the product that you supporting may or may not be desktop-based
product, especially nowadays. Yeah.
Okay. So we need some kind of mobile compatibility. We'll
just leave it at that. We don't know what level yet. Okay.
Shifting our Focus to the last quadrant. So we've got we've got who she is
rough idea of her of her psychographic demographic profile. What her Mane needs are what are the types of
things that we can help her with when it comes to her needs. So just to recap the knees,
easily connect with, customers timely resolution, a broad spectrum of
user sophistication. She needs to coordinate between multiple systems, she needs to share
screens. She needs to take control of the user system and
some level of mobile compatibility. What are the types of things that we can do for her?
To help address some of these needs with our product.
It's a being able to send invites send invitations, okay?
What else?
Well your dice Tufts or
task prioritization?
Okay.
What else?
We need some kind of cross cross platform.
Ability, right? So this thing can run, at least at least in the client mode
on an on desktop, right? So some kind of cross
cross-platform compatibility, what else
What else can we do for her?
Screen sharing.
Write it on there.
And we can also add screen take over
your screen control is my handwriting
deteriorates. What else?
Let's can we do for her?
Text chat chat. I chat. Windows could be helpful.
Right. Label it to run in the background so if she needs to do something else
on in the background. Yep, terrific. Okay.
This is a good start. Look, it's a start.
At our guests about who we want to potentially Focus, Neo calling on and that's
Jane, our customer service rep. The next one I want to do is our
families one.
Okay, now family is Broad, right? We didn't actually pick a person. So we need to get a little bit
more focused when it comes to families. And so, who do we want to focus
on in the family? Who's met, who's going to be
the likeliest person in the family, to initiate these phone
calls, or to use this type of service. Thank you, Mom
apparently parents, because agree, new parent.
New parent, terrific. Let's give our our, our parent, a
name.
Mary Mary. Okay.
And how old is Mary while I draw her.
However b737. She's a new parent agree with that.
You guys agree with 37, new parent, might be a little younger though. 3/7 is an outrageous
but like, I'm pretty to me. I would tend to agree with that. And so the question
then becomes right? The question becomes, I'm going to put a new parent on here
is, is there a fundamental
Do we believe there's a fundamental change difference in the way that a 32-year
old would use our product versus a 37 year old?
If there is yes, if you believe, so then 32
is it's worth debating between 32 and 37, right? But if you don't believe,
so then maybe not. But you're saying yes, you believe that there is I think there
is from personal experience. But okay, I don't want my personal experience,
15 what we have to start somewhere, right? And so, and since we haven't done any
any research yet, this is our first guess at who we'd like to
Target.
Because when we finish this, we're going to use these as recruiting targets. We're going to
go find Mary. We're going to go find Jane. I'm going to make sure a
that they exist.
Right. Be that they have these pain points and then see that our
Solutions help them in their world. And if any of those things are false, we go
back. And we rewrite these and then we start that process again, okay?
Mary's are new parents, she's 32 years old. Let's talk about her, psychographic and demographic information,
Is she employed?
Where does she stay home? What do you guys think? All right. 20 hours
a week part-time. Okay. Part-time employee.
Does it matter what she does? What does she do?
Graphic design, graphic design. Okay.
If at any point you guys disagree. This is the time to raise your hand and say, listen. I don't think that that's
actually accurate or that's true. What else? So
education, level level of Education.
What we thinking?
Masters. Yeah, okay. It's got a master's in
design.
Terrific.
Tech savviness.
It's a, if she's got a master's in design, she's probably pretty technically Savvy. Yeah.
So she's Matt probably Mac User.
Right.
Tech savvy. Why is she?
What's driving her to use any kind of online conference calling or media
sharing service?
If she's a part-time, mom, she's and are part-time
employed. She's probably communicating with both her company and
probably trying to share her experience with her family, right? Social
parents in-laws, I'm going to say she's making
mixed
calls.
All day, right? Some business.
Some personal.
What else? What else is important? So, when interesting challenge with this particular
product is that it's multi-sided, right? So we've got users who
are the recipient of the calls as well as the makers of the calls. And and while I think
these personas are really interesting, I'm equally if not more interested in the people on the other
end of the phone. I'm so calling in this particular circumstance,
I'm thinking grandparents and they're the ones that are particularly if they're
remote or the ones that are most.
Wanting that media sharing, right? Right, what's that going to need some? So that's
interesting, right? So there's this several ways to approach this first and foremost, is I
say, let's talk about who she's calling. Right, let's start there. So
she's calling grandparents calling calling new grandparents,
which, which effects.
Our.
Our decisions down here the other the other way to push this to say you know what actually
Mary maybe not shouldn't be the focus, our initial Focus, maybe we should actually
dig into the grandparents instead.
And that's okay, right. Because our investment in this particular Persona is
about five minutes old at this point and it's made up of this and
paper, right? So if through this collaborative
assumption declaration process, we decide that this is not actually what we want to go
first. That's okay, we can switch to grandparent and we can just do it again.
So what do you guys think? Do you think there's more value in pursuing? Grandparents, first are sticking with Mary
Mary seems similar enough to Jane that I would argue to move
to grandparents and parents but what do you guys think? Grandparents Day
sound. Less tech-savvy. Yeah so that's rep. More
be killing suicidal. Okay. Alright so we're going to we're going to
try grandparents and that's perfect. And that's okay, right?
Because this is
The amount of waste that we just generated is Trivial, we're
just going to start again. And so, what is our while I draw? Our
our grand. I'm just a grandmother. Is that? Okay, or do we want to do grandfather?
I think grandfather might help because my father, okay, so while I draw
our grandfather, can you tell me what his name is?
Mike. Mike.
Okay. And how old is Mike? Grandpa Mike 6868.
Okay, terrific.
Let's talk about Grandpa, Mike.
What's he do? These days, you're tired, you're tired. Okay.
And so how does he fill his days? Works on his lawn? It
cleans. He works on his lawn all day. Okay, that's good though.
How often does he talk to his family?
Every day every day, does he initiate the call?
I think it would be more of a once-a-week. Yeah. And
I would think it would probably be a little bit less.
Than once a day. Maybe twice a week. Okay, let's say
twice a week.
Twice a week, family phone calls.
And what's Mike, what's Mike's?
Tech savviness level, not very technical, not very technical
feature phone or yes, just get an iPhone. What? Yeah,
is he is it seemed to tablet world? Is he is he using iPhones? What
do you guys think?
Maybe, you know, a feature phone and a
tablet but not a lot of computer. Yeah, I'm thinking feature phone
and tablet as well. I think your phone
tablet.
Does he own a desktop?
What do you think? Yeah, the desktop in
Windows has a circus. Mm. Yeah. Outdated.
Windows. XP makes sense.
And how do you feel about technology in general?
Somewhat frustrated. Yeah, frustrated by technology.
Okay.
Let's move on to his needs. What are his needs? What can we do
for Grandpa Mike? You want to see his grandson wants to see his
grandson. Absolutely?
What else?
What are his needs?
That we can help with.
Boston, Pat keep it easy. It is once that
keep the experience easy, focus more on his
Communication with this family, then actually connecting to them. All
right, I'll be a little more technical than so. It's interesting. So sometimes you come up
with these ideas that kind of bridge, both of these. So I what I was starting to
write was a low-friction experience,
right? That's actually it's more over here, right?
Because that's that's the thing that we can create and so
a low-friction experience.
Gives Grandpa. Mike what serves? What need for him.
Focus on the call rather than the tech, right?
So he needs to focus on
call rather than Tech. What else aren't Grandpa? Mike's
needs might blow out the wants to see his grandkids a little bit
more Insurance to he wants to interact with them. There
might be
Different experiences that he wants to have. Yeah, do more than just talk,
right? See his kids grow up his grandkids grow, right?
More than talk, what else has retired? He went he might want them
mobile compatibility as well because he's
so what does that give him? You know, he
made he may be spending some time traveling, he may be spending some time at home,
okay. So we're going to say that he travels a lot travels regularly.
What else? You might be hearing or visually impaired. So, maybe the
ability to have a high quality video, be
able to zoom and just Crystal Clear audio, okay?
So we'll just put wears glasses.
okay, so so needs are
Large targets. We want that in here.
What are the needs? Does he have, right? Not just, not just technological with
psychological. He wants to see his grandkids. He wants to watch them grow up.
What else? Let's play games with him. Play games? Yeah.
Is there anyone else that he's calling with this?
One of the things I've certainly witnessed is a desire to have.
His wife involved. So, mmm, okay. But shouldn't necessarily be an
expectation that it's a wonder. One phone call.
Paulie wife Nicole? Okay, great.
So then how do we, how do we help them? So we always, we always start a couple of things we
so his needs. Are he wants to see his grandkids? He wants to focus on the
called rather than the technology actually wants to interact more with his grandkids more than
just talk, maybe play games and he wants to involve his wife in the call. So
we talked about low-friction Experience, mobile compatibility large
targets. What else can we do for Grandpa? Mike, that helps them address some of these needs. Hi,
Sam quality.
Sound quality? Yep.
What else?
Voice recognition dialing so it's easier for them to just for
styling. Yeah. Okay.
so,
we just came up with two potential Target audiences for Neo calling.
How many of you think that we got these? A hundred percent, right?
Right, how do you think we got these? A hundred percent wrong?
Right. We're somewhere in the middle. And so the next step that we would take as a
team was to go out and to find out if Mike and
Jane actually exist. That's our first test if they don't exist. We got to
come back and figure out what we've learned from that from those conversations and adjust
that. Once we find out, if they exist, is where they actually have these
needs.
Whether our assumptions about what motivates them and what they need are
actually true.
And then finally whether our Solutions actually have value to them. So these start to serve as our
initial recruiting targets and our job is to get out as quickly as we can
and try to find these people. This is our first assumption that we're
declaring, its personas.
the next thing that we're going to declare our outcomes,