In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a character ( “the old man from scene 24” ) guarded “the bridge of death.” He demanded that the heroes answer three questions before they could cross. If they answered wrong, they were “cast into the gorge of eternal peril.”
A lot of us have been on that project. The one where the offering doesn’t work, it isn’t adopted, and we’re not sure why. Did anyone even ask us the questions?
To cross the “bridge of death” to a successful offering, there are three questions that you must answer. You must answer them so that you can intelligently decide what the offering is.
- Who are the users? All of them.
- What work are they trying to do?
- What are their needs in context?
These are the questions that I use with my teams at the start of every project. In more detail:
1. We first need to ask who all the customers, providers and stakeholders are. We identify as many as we can at the beginning. We actively seek to discover the rest as we conduct research. These are the people involved.
2. We need to understand what work the people are trying to accomplish. They each have an end goal beyond purchasing an offering (for a consumer) or following a process (for a provider). The goal is not attached to the offering or process. Most people would be happy to get it done with a magic wand instead. So what is that goal?
3. What are the people’s needs in context? What in their lives or in business do they have to contend with? What’s it really like to be them? What work do they have to do to get to that goal in question 2?
Design is the practice I use to answer these questions. Design using human-centered research gets you good understanding. Answer the right questions. Don’t be cast into the gorge of eternal peril.
