UX Intensive: Customer Value: Resonating with Customer Needs
[Notes from the first day of the UX Intensive]
Framing a viable offering
Who is the target audience? What experiences are compelling to them? How is your offering different from competitors and substitutes?
An example of substitution is the discovery by Lexus that the alternative to purchasing a Lexus is often taking a big vacation or buying a big piece of jewelry. These kinds of non-competitors can be very important to keep in mind.
The way to get to the answers to these questions is to use an elevator pitch. This is what you say about your projects when trying to sell it to your audience in duration of an elevator trip.
Use a MadLib like this:
For (target customers. your main market segment only)
who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative),
our product/service is (new product category)
that provides (key problem-solving capability).
Unlike (the product alternative)
we have (differentiating attributes of your offering).
Using the "dissatisfied" portion helps you focus on the problem. You could substitute this with a positive statement if need-be.
[Time for an exercise.]
These elevator pitches are an opportunity to get input from high up the decision tree. When you hit ambiguous words like "discerning" use this as an opportunity to unpack what they mean. Get to specifics. Get a first draft and then go back and clean it up. Remind everyone that they are coming up with something that is for the customer. Think about what is meaningful to average people.
The web site should embody what the organization represents so if you get an elevator pitch for the organization you are well on the way to understanding what needs to be taken into account for the web site. Do a broad first draft for the organization and then pare it down to what about the organization's pitch is relevant to the web site. Keep the focus on the organization as a whole and talk about the web site out of that. Don't let focussing on the web site distract from other organizational questions.
Don't be afraid to iterate. Do this a few times in a meeting. Use these techniques to guide conversation. Treat them as a living document.
Use the pitch to embody the assumptions of the organization. This gives you a great place to start your research process. Look at the clear definition of the audience in the pitch and use this as a starting place. Express your assumptions in this step. Go do your field research. Come back and create a better more accurate elevator pitch.
[Thinking about these cycles in a project is a very interesting question. Avoiding a linear process seems like a profoundly important goal that is hard to achieve.]
This is the kind of thing you want to do in a workshop meeting. This is not the kind of thing you will get value from if you just e-mail it. This is about facilitating the conversation.
Once you have this written, take a look at it again with your competitor's names in the elevator pitch. If it still makes sense do it again. You and your organization are different from your competition.
Here's a test: look at Skymall. If your product would make sense in Skymall you are not likely providing much customer value.
So how does the elevator pitch really really impact user experience? This is about the first impression. You have about eight seconds to impress your users.
- What is this thing? reorienting on landing
- What does it mean? determining value
- What should I do next? making a micro-commitment
All you need on the web is the small commitment to click once more, to keep reading for a moment longer.
For Blogger there were three questions:
- What is a blog?
- What can you do with it?
- How do I get one?
Articulating customer value provides clearly differentiated and meaningful offerings, getting new value into the world, market viability, etc.
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Who is this guy?
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