- You might have an idea for a product you want to build,
but how do you know if it's the right idea?
Maybe you identified an issue
based on your own experiences.
Maybe you've been tracking customer feedback
on an earlier release of your product,
or maybe you have a project roadmap
and it's time to implement the next phase of the project.
Before you go ahead and start building,
it's essential that you go and watch some people
doing the activities you want to make a solution for.
Why?
Because it allows you to see the true issues
and what people do to get around those issues today.
When you read or listen to product feedback,
people give you their solutions, not their problems.
Because they're caught up inside the process,
their solution might not be the best one
for the real underlying issue.
It's the same if you want to build a product
based on an issue you experience.
Remember though, that your assumptions
are based on a sample of one person, you.
Before you go any further, take the time to work out
whether other people have the same issue,
and what it is that they do to work around it today.
In either case, whether you're starting
from product feedback or from your own idea,
you'll get better insight into the true problem
by watching other people working through the tasks
that you think need to be improved.
What if there isn't existing software out there
for the task you want to observe?
Well, there's probably a manual way
that people perform the task today.
In fact, if you can't find that manual task,
I'd question how valuable your solution is going to be.
People's tasks don't change very much over time.
Just the way they perform them changes.
If there isn't existing software,
find the manual tasks that people are performing
and watch that instead.
It's essential that you go to the place
where the activity happens.
Just bringing people to your office
to ask them questions doesn't give you
the background information
or the understanding of the little steps
that they might forget to tell you about.
Those nuances in the interaction
could be the pieces that actually make
the biggest difference in the whole process.
It's also really important to go in with an open mind.
Rather than asking people how wonderful
the solution you're already thinking about is,
take the time to listen to and understand
their true problems.
You'll have to tease out those problems
from some of the solutions they offer up to you.
But if you do your job well and get to the true root cause
of the issues they face, you'll be in a position to generate
a truly useful solution that people want to use.
For our example project, the project leader
is a mountain biker.
He identified the problem of making donations
to the crews that perform voluntary maintenance
on mountain bike trails.
His initial idea was to build an app
that let trail users buy the trail maintenance crews
a virtual drink, as a way of saying thanks.
In order to check that this assumption is true,
we're going go to where these trail maintainers
currently do their work and their fundraising.
We'll watch them in action,
watch their interaction with trail users,
talk to some of these trail users too,
and use those observations to extract the pain points
that exist in the current way of raising funds.