Practice 3 In Lean Start-up Strategy: Are you trying to solve a problem that is not a problem at all?

As designers, we talked about empathy a lot, that is to understand how users think, how they feel, how they say and how they do. But in some cases, our assumption are far from the real need of users. And we are merely too obsessed with our own assumptions that we can hardly realize the fact that we are creating problems rather than solving them. Then the way to help us stay calm and keep on the right direction is experimentation as Dan McKinley mentioned. In addition, periodical experimentation helps to lower the risk and reduce cost of feature changes.  

 

To set the final goal as the prove of sucess.

Except their incremental redesign process, one important detail that I mentioned was the way they tested their changes. They use sales amount rather than click times as the prove of success. In the project of Infinite Roll, Dan discribled that, "after the change, there was a very slight improvement in the number of people that ever got to a item page. But there's no increase in purchase." So we can tell that some middle improvement such as click times, viewed items may be confusing. But only by the final goal of consumer purchase can we clearly tell the result is good or bad.  


One Lesson I learned through my concept test: Flexibility vs Thoughtfulness

This week, we started to test our concept about furniture trade and recycle. However, in our questionnaire we set the "default need" that everyone will like furniture recycle and furniture delivery. So we only tested that where they prefer to buy single furniture or a furniture set and they would love to buy furnitures or rent furnitures. So that our original question was like this:

You Prefer:

  1. Single Furniture Sell + Furniture Recycle + Furniture Delivery
  2. Furniture Set Sell + Furniture Recycle + Furniture Delivery
  3. Furniture Set Rental + Furniture Recycle + Furniture Delivery

After reading Dan's paper, I think our concept can be broken into 5 minimal versions: Single furniture sell, furniture set sell, furniture rental, furniture recycle and furniture delivery. So that our question(multi choice) should be like this:

You Prefer:

  1. Single Furniture Sell
  2. Furniture Set Sell
  3. Furniture Set Rental
  4. Furniture Recycle
  5.  Furniture Delivery

Reference: http://mcfunley.com/design-for-continuous-experimentation

Xinli LinComment