I was excited for the training I attended this week called Design Thinking. The trainer, Experience Point, based the whole session on the methodology of IDEO, one of the greatest design firms that have come up with innovative solutions that we use everyday.
A bunch of blogs and startup readings, have been about getting out of the building and talking to customers. At Bimotics, we have constantly talked with small business owners of all types about our business idea, our tagline, our data sources we want to connect. Sometimes we got an excited response and sometimes the person simply didn’t get it. Getting to talk to anyone that will hear us out was always appreciated, but I can’t say the talks were always helpful. There was continued ambiguity on how to put what a business owner was saying in a context that made sense.
In the design thinking training, I learned the concept of observing the extreme users. Extreme users are those that fall outside of the normal 80% if you are looking at a normal distribution. The extreme user is on both sides of the 80%. The first group represents the users that love and have completely adopted and live the subject you are studying. The other group represents the users that never use or care about the subject.
Observing these groups is the key to getting real insight. You can see the difference between each extreme user. This can help provide context needed to get more quality insight. Being able to observe the right group requires a bit of profiling and a clear understanding of what you want to learn. Observing is not just having conversations with random users. It is almost opposite, it is about consciously being objective and simply trying to understand how the user ticks. When you have a conversation you may instill bias unintentionally.
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