Diverse feedback spurs creativity for innovative product development
Original article here by Chloe, our Research Director.
Chloe gave a talk about diversity and creativity for product development for the Digital Northampton #TechatTen event on Digital Diversity at the end of October 2020, and she shares her key takeaways here.
We looked at how diverse feedback can spur creativity for innovative product development using user research and design thinking.
What is user research?
User research is learning about what life is like for other people trying to do a specific activity that your product is trying to help with. Research uncovers how other people go about doing a specific thing, what issues they have when trying to do that activity and how they use (or could use) your product within the context or process, from their perspective. Getting these insights helps to build a better understanding of customers and your market.
What can you get from user research?
From the very beginning when you've got a product idea or later in the product lifecycle when you may be looking to adapt an existing product, user research delivers on identifying, defining and sizing the problem for particular markets and user groups.
User research also includes UX testing to get a sense of how well this product fits in to the existing way of doing things. Testing a product idea through low-fidelity prototyping gives a sense of whether it is a good solution to the problem uncovered in the earlier user research. UX testing of a working prototype helps to get a good idea of how people get on with using it (do they get frustrated? do they get lost?) to identify its design strengths and weaknesses.
Once a product is in the market, user feedback is important and different metrics and tools can capture user experience through more quantitative means such as Google Analytics or Hotjar with perhaps more ad hoc qualitative, in-depth conversations with users.
Diverse feedback can spur creativity for effective innovation
This image is a design thinking framework but there are quite a few out there such as stanford d.school bootleg and Design Council's Double Diamond. It's a solution-based approach that sees challenges customers have as 'problems' and the iterative process helps to get to a 'solution' which is what your product or service offers.
Having user research insights helps to empathise with the user and define the problem with the fun part coming next - ideation.
Teams can get collaborative and discuss the insights to build on these for creative ideas. User research can provide insights from diverse customers with varying world views and accessibility needs, but share the same 'problem' you're looking to design a solution for to help with to be identifiable to be in a specific user group.
Using techniques such as extreme user maps and stakeholder mapping can help to uncover diverse users to include in research. If necessary, user feedback could be complemented by stakeholder feedback from employees and partners.
Having internal processes and systems to capture and build on these ideation sessions can bring these insights through the product development process through innovation management.
Get out of the building!
It's not just design thinking that encourages empathetic design through understanding customers. Steve Blank who advocates lean startup says:
So get out the building (figuratively speaking) right now! Get out and speak to your customers to gather insights to learn.
Key Takeaways
Ultimately, having diverse feedback from users, teams, customers and stakeholders can give you a range of ideas to build upon when ideating about your product and boost creativity for innovation which could be a solution to a problem.
User research can help you empathise and understand the people you’re designing your product for to develop ideas that solve real needs. There is one caveat, having too much diverse feedback could be a challenge so keeping it focused to a certain user group or relevant stakeholders or team members can help and having insight-led innovation as part of a well-managed innovation management process can lead to great products.
Resources
Diversity Confirmed To Boost Innovation And Financial Results https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diversity-confirmed-to-boost-innovation-and-financial-results/?sh=5cda7d41c4a6
The business case for diversity in the workplace is now overwhelming https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/
How Diversity Can Drive Innovation https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
