Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Figuring out who your users are can be challenging. Many times stakeholders can have varying and conflicting opinions about what users deserve focus. Personas help manage this, but they're products of user research. Prior to research, it's important to provide some direction on who will be studied and in what capacity.

As I was preparing for a brainstorming session, I started thinking about how to start discussion about a business' users without explicitly asking "who do you think your users are?" That approach seemed rife with canned answers; I was looking for something different.

"Hire Your Users" is technique that would be applied in early discovery to start defining these boundaries. Using the metaphor of a hiring process, it helps design strategists and stakeholders collaborate on who the users are, in what order they should be considered, what they need to accomplish, and how they might do so.

In use, a facilitator would guide discussion around the following points:

What's the need?
This first question is used to start translating the business strategy and mission into tactical needs. Like hiring for a position, it uses the business objectives as input and defines how these can be accomplished. Often, this information is known and socialized; hopefully, the facilitator will not need to dwell too long here.

Who do we hire?
This question is starts to map those business needs to user segments and define their characteristics. To do this, we would use a job description to organize and divide the users. Doing so places rigor around each segment to reduce misinterpretation. Within each description are the following:

• Job title - a succinct phrase that defines the user type
• Position summary - this focuses on the core mission and goals of the user
• Responsibilities - the tasks they must perform to support the goals
• Experience - their background, knowledge, traits and capabilities

How will they accomplish this?
This question starts to elicit the features and content that may be needed to support the user's responsibilities. Demonstrating this relationship is important since it helps ensure technology is driven by business need and not the other way around. It should also help ensure that features are justifiable and not simply faddish.

What can we offer?
This question is about trade-offs. For this task, the participants are given a personnel budget of $100,000. Using a divide-the-dollar approach, they apportion that sum among all of the job descriptions. The result is a rough indication of the order and degree of priority of the segments.

 

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I've just hacked together this idea, so I'm hoping to hear your thoughts. Take this further? Abandon it immediately? 

Have you ever noticed how some designers take notes? I work with a lot of designers in a strategic communications agency and we talk a lot about how to help our clients meet their goals. Much of what we do is story-telling through design. In our agency we do an enormous amount of brainstorming in special brainstorming rooms. 

When we are running through dozens of ideas for a particular client several days after a brainstorm some of our designers will pull out a moleskin or sketchpad they used to record the session. In that book are a multitude of doodles or sketches having what seems to me to have nothing to do with the brainstorm we both attended.

Our designers will open to the page and read back through their sketches, recalling exactly what happend in a strikingly accurate blow-by-blow.

I am so impressed by that. It is like a parallel syntax they use with fluency.  What's more, in much of our work, it gets used in our creative concepting and its smart.

So, if you are in a brainstorm and your designers are doodling, don't worry, its their way of taking notes, passing time, rapid prototyping and rendering a flurry of ideas into an indellible picture for later.