Читать книгу Validating Product Ideas - Tomer Sharon - Страница 34

Converse like a talk show host, think like a writer, understand subtext like a psychiatrist, have an ear like a musician.

—Lawrence Grobel (celebrity interviewer)

Interviewing is a research activity in which you gather information through direct dialogue. It is a great way to uncover and understand people’s feelings, desires, struggles, delights, attitudes, and opinions. Interviewing people whom you assume to be your target audience (and those you think are not) is a great way to get to know your users, segment them, design for them, solve their problems, and provide value. An interview can be held in person (highly recommended and preferred, you’ll learn so much more) or remotely over a phone or some kind of a video conference (second best, you’ll get your answers but won’t learn enough).

Meet Anna, a 37-year-old soccer mom who lives in Fairlawn, New Jersey. Anna is a producer at CNBC in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. She has two kids (ages 3 and 8), is married to Bob, an analyst in a brokerage firm in New York City, and has an income of $115,000 per year. Anna’s biggest challenge related to grocery shopping is that she’s struggling to come up with a variety of dishes that are both healthy and desirable for her kids. She also finds herself spending a lot of time at the store dealing with her kids’ behavior rather than focusing on getting what she needs quickly. And she always is looking for great deals that will save her money. She would love to get more organized with her grocery shopping and cooking and find someone to occupy her kids and prevent tantrums while at the grocery store.

Makes sense, right? Looks like the beginning of a useful persona, doesn’t it? If we had just a few more of these, we could be well on our way to tailoring a kick-ass app for grocery shopping.

Well, everything you just read about Anna is false. I jotted it down in five minutes, and it is all based on my guesses and assumptions gathered through my own grocery shopping experiences (at least ones I can remember) and of my wife’s.

A word about personas. A persona is a description of an archetypical user of a product. It’s a communication tool that helps align development (and other) teams with different types of users. Personas are a great way to create a common language about users and raise empathy toward them within an organization. Unlike what many people think, personas are not a research methodology. The biggest problem with personas is that, in many cases, they are not based on research but on assumptions, guesses, and beliefs. It’s perfectly fine to start with an assumption and then validate or invalidate it, yet creating a persona based on guesses and then trusting it without any research behind it is just wrong.

These non-research-based personas were given names such as assumptive or ad-hoc personas (coined by Tamara Adlin), provisional personas (coined by Kim Goodwin), or proto-personas (coined by Jeff Gothelf). If there’s no research behind a persona, I prefer a more direct name for it. I like to call it a bullshit persona. You start with a bullshit persona, you do your research, and only then do you have a persona. If you skip research, you’re left with just bullshit.