Making User Experience Part of Business Strategy | Understanding a Product’s Target Culture

Presumptive Design

“I have been promoting a process that I’ve dubbed presumptive design,” says Leo. “You can learn about it in my five-minute Ignite talk. In presumptive design, internal stakeholders participate in a generative research and participatory design process to elicit assumptions about their future product vision. The participants in this creation session must include product teams, stakeholders in business and finance, and any others who you must bring on board for the product’s success. This first part of the process is not unlike many other visioning processes.

“Where presumptive design goes a step further is in then involving the targets of that vision, or external stakeholders, in a series of engagement sessions, in which they immerse themselves in the vision by using a mockup or junk prototype. The purpose of these sessions is not to refine the vision directly, but instead to generate provocative conversations about the internal stakeholders’ assumptions that were the genesis of the mockup. The immediate feedback that external stakeholders provide holds a mirror up to the internal team. The team then incorporates this feedback into a revised vision that has substantially greater nuance, sophistication, and most important from a business perspective, reduced risk, which is a fundamental concern inherent in any future-leaning endeavor.

“This approach is also useful in understanding the culture of a business, which is this column’s second topic of discussion.”

Jobs to Be Done Approach

“It’s difficult to determine what the best solution is without knowing the nuances of the team, project, and organization,” replies Jordan. “I prefer the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) approach to product design, but that doesn’t mean it’s best for every project, every organization, or every team. That said, the first step in product design involves defining the product vision through business-model analysis, which examines the details and structure of the organization’s business model to determine how a new product could or should fit within that model. I’ve had success using the Business Model Canvas as a visual way of developing a product vision from a business-model analysis. Once you’ve defined a general product vision, you can use the JTBD method to define goals and requirements. There are tons of forums, blogs, groups, books, and articles that enable anyone to dive as deep into the JTBD method as they want, but here’s a short summary of how I use it.

“I start by translating the product vision into jobs that the product could help users do. I then define the competition based on the job, as opposed to the product. For instance, when Maytag thinks of its competition, it may look at Kenmore, Electrolux, Samsung, Whirlpool, and GE. However, when we examine a job to be done first—for example, getting clothes clean—alternative sources of competition emerge: using a dry cleaners, using a laundromat, and using mom’s washing machine are all competitors for getting clothes clean.

“Once you have defined the competition properly, you can start figuring out the product requirements. An ethnographic approach typically leads to the most insightful results, but talking with actual users is a must. The JTBD method considers the job—in our example, getting clothes clean—and finds users who have recently hired or fired a product that does that job to participate in an ethnographic study. For instance, Maytag might talk with someone who had recently fired a dry cleaners or just started using a new laundromat. The goal of the study should be to define the reasons a person hired or fired the product or service. Once you understand these reasons, you can prioritize them and translate them into feature sets. You can then prototype each feature and test it with actual users. Typically, you’ll produce several iterations of any product design before launching the product in a wide release.

“Again, this is not necessarily the best way, but it’s worked well for me. Any complicated process such as product design should involve a team of professionals who are capable of keeping the project pointed in the right direction. Any product-design process should consider who’s on the team, the stakeholders, and the culture of the organization developing the product before selecting the best solution for them.”

Understanding the Culture for Which You Are Providing a Design Solution

Q: What are some ways of better understanding a culture for which you’re designing a product or service?—from a UXmatters reader

“You can either observe people using a competitive product or service or an earlier version of your own product or service, or you can create a prototype and observe people using it,” responds Jordan. “Your goal shouldn’t be to understand the culture, but to understand the anxieties and motivations of the people actually using the product or service. Internationalization and cultural research are often the basis of large ethnographic studies that companies conduct prior to product design to determine product viability. Anthropology and digital anthropology are fields that focus on investigating cultures that develop in the real world and online, respectively.”

“One of the best ways to truly understand a culture for which you are designing a product or service is to do some type of anthropologically flavored user research,” advises Cory. “In business, opportunities for true anthropological research are limited—though I wish there were more opportunities! However, there are plenty of research approaches that are useful in user experience. There may be ways to observe users as they interact with each other and with certain artifacts—perhaps those that have a battery or plug or those that do not.

“When there is sufficient time and budget—and if you can actually be a participant within a particular culture without its tainting your findings—there may be opportunities to be a participant-observer and really learn about those who are going to use a product. When time and budget are more limited, as is often the case, you can employ more traditional, moderated user research approaches such as focus-group discussions or user interviews. What I often find when doing this kind of research is that what seems like a single culture to a client actually turns out to be a culture that is stratified in ways that would impact the creation of the product’s user interface. For example, there might be divisions by age, familiarity with technology, or understanding of a language.”