Purpose: To "walk a mile in your customer's shoes" by going into the "field" and understanding the holistic work environment and problems faced by the customer.
Personnel to job shadow: Depending on the size of business, the user of your product and its buyer may be different or else, they may have different needs from it. Interview all stakeholders. At a minimum, there should be three users and two managers.
Perform user observations and interviews in the field, along with assumption testing. Summarize the user research and prepare research tools in anticipation for the next session.
Purpose: To stimulate ideation that is beyond the obvious. Through collaborative thinking, we will co-create "future-thinking" solutions with the users and managers.
This also serves the purpose of getting buy-in immediately from the customer as they are part of the design process.
Personnel: minimum one group consisting of a manager and 2-3 user, preferably the same people that were job shadowed and interviewed.
Procedure:
Present the user research from their first session to the customer.
Prime creative thinking through focused reflection and ideal scenario ideation.
Using a variety of tangible "Make Tools", customer co-creates tangible "prototypes" of products that address their core needs; they build one or more future scenarios.
Note: Make Tools are a collection of artefacts that participants use to build physical prototypes.
Purpose: To combine results of the customer co-creation session with our own observational analysis, and narrow down the best 2-3 solutions to rapid prototype.
Personnel: Internal team
Note: Using all the data we have, we will do the following:
Find key, common points and trends.
Develop and sketch ideal, future solutions.
Analyse our solutions.
Prepare for prototyping.
Purpose: To create 2-3 low-fidelity prototypes of the most promising solutions that can be validated by the customer.
Personnel: Internal team
Note: Low-fidelity prototypes can be made out of paper, sketches, pictures, etc. The idea is to produce a prototype quickly and cheaply such that we can validate the solution and return on investment.
Purpose: To validate the effectiveness of the prototypes with the customer, impact on their bottom line, and solicit their feedback for improvement.
Personnel: user and managers.
Note: The prototypes requires customer validation to determine what had the most impact.
Purpose: To finalize on what the optimal solution is.
Personnel: Internal team
Note: At this stage, we validate the efficacy of the prototypes, identifying key aspects of each prototype that worked well, then synthesizing those results into a final solution design.
Purpose: To provide the customer with a validated solution so that we can make a confident decision on product development.
Personnel: Customer
Note: Present prototype findings to customer, along with a finalized low-fidelity prototype of a suggested solution. Try to make a pre-sale or a get a commitment to purchase.
Purpose: During product development, the product must constantly be released and tested with the customer. The goal is to validate value via a pre-sale, sales, or official commitment to purchase.
Personnel: Customer
Note: Release every 3 months officially. Beta release every 2 weeks and test with customer.