What - Building meaningful solutions

Building solutions is about translating users' needs into positive outcomes, both for the user and your product, and essentially to your business. Don't ask your users what they want, try to understand what they need by talking to them and observing what they do.

To understand what you need to build, you need to understand how users are currently getting their jobs done. This can be done by for example journey-mapping, breadboarding or creating user flows. Whatever it may be called, the key is to listen to your users, observe what they do and see it for yourself. Going directly to the users help you both understand the journey the currently take, but also uncover the painpoints in the process and feel the users' emotions as they navigate through their tasks.

Understanding the user's journey in your own product will also help in building analyses on the users journey, or funnel, through the product. Data on the user funnels help you identify potential improvement points, and asking your users will give you insights on what may cause people not to proceed to the desired outcomes. Listening to the user's language also helps you adjust your product to fit the users thinking and mental models. Using an opportunity-solution-tree helps bridge the desired business outcomes to the users' journeys and help find the most impactful areas to address for solving users problems to achieve desirable business outcomes.

Whatever the context, mapping business problems and customer problems can be done through the same means: understand the business through quantified data and talk directly to the customers to understand their context.

Finding the intersection of business and customer problems and the most impactful areas to address through opportunity-solution-tree gives you a five why's approach to go deeper into the customer problems below the immediate surface. Seeing how personnel in a brick-and-mortar store work in the physical space interacting with the in-store customers, walk between the cash register and backroom storage and fulfilling online orders in-between, gives a very clear picture of the every-day practical problems that lead to reduced performance fulfilling online orders - more so than speculating the issues in the comfort of your own desk.

In every different context, it is of utmost importance to not base your decisions on how you wish or think your product should be used, but understand the customers job-to-be-done, and address the customers needs and look at your product through their eyes.

For example airline passengers are not primarily looking to sign up or wanting to join a frequent flyer program, they are using the airplanes to get to their holiday or work destination, and while doing that may benefit from signing up to save their tickets online for later modifications or getting additional perks offered by the airline's frequent flyer program. Just by reducing friction from a step to sign up may not lead to the desired outcome, if the sign up action in itself does not provide any value to the customer.

In the case of a brick-and-mortar fashion stores, while from your product's perspective it may be obvious how the online orders are processed, the store personnel are managing multiple tools and processes, carrying physical devices and fashion items. Our solution and process was just one of many, often deprioritised because of the service provided for their primary customer segment, the in-store customers.

Eventually the mobile application for the fashion stores needed to be as much out of the sight when not needed, and just provide the nudge to pick up the items as new orders came in. This lead to high product adoption as it didn't add to the burden of things to remember, and thus lead to shorter fulfilment times and fewer order cancellations. In the case of the airline's new frequent flyer program, the program was designed to be useful from day one and first flight forwards, still providing those extra benefits for those who flew frequently. After the new program was launched, the number of users who signed up and joined the frequent flyer program during the purchase of their flights multiplied.

Talk to the customers and build something that the customers need and value and lead to your businesses desired outcomes.

Observe what users do and ask what they aspire to achieve. Build for what they need, not what they want. Use quantitative data to understand the general behaviors of what users do. Use qualitative feedback from users to understand why they do what they do and don't do. Address the user's need with a solution that is focused on achieving the desired business outcome. Measure how your solution leads to those desired outcomes.

Inspiration and Further Reading: