So you had some great customer interviews as part of your Design Thinking exercise. You felt that you empathized well with the customers and generated awesome insight. Wonderful.
Before your memory evaporates you’d want to write down your thoughts quickly and effectively, as we all know how painful it is to replay scenes later from memory alone.
This is where I’d like to share a tip. Free-style notes are already enormously helpful, but if you can have those thoughts put into a format that can be used immediately and directly as ingredients for the next defining the problem and ideation stage in Design Thinking, that would be awesome right? Here’s my suggestion:
Try going with the FLOW in capturing your thoughts:
F: Findings
L: Learnings
O: Opportunities
W: Wonders
Example:
While adoption of the pre-order app for our Daily Greens salad store has been going up, we’ve been observing that a good portion of our regulars still queue up in-store to order. So we want to find ways to convert our regulars to the app, which would help us reduce the queue and improve convenience to them (no lining up!).
One of my interviewees was Maurice who visits our store at least twice a week during lunch time to take-away his salad.
I FOUND that Maurice actually has downloaded and registered for our app already but wasn’t using it.
I LEARNED that he stumbled and gave up at the ordering menu stage of the app: “I always go for the build-your-own-salad option with 2 proteins and 10 veggies, so felt a bit of hassle when trying to do this all on the small screen of my phone, and I gave up and just walked over here, haha!” I suggested that we actually have a save your favorite salad function on the app and it’s just a one time hassle and the next order will be easier. Maurice chuckled “But yah, I guess I’m lazy, haha!”
So the OPPORTUNITY here is to help our customers get over the hump of first time app usage, and this time it’s about helping them place their complex salad order with ease. If we can find a quick and easy way to let people like Maurice input his favorite salad combo, we’ll get over this hump and convert him into an app user and free them from the queue.
I WONDER how might we simplify the salad combo building interface?
[And as an afterthought typing up this post-interview notes, it occurred to me now, I WONDER if we can print a QR code on the receipt from his last in-store purchase so that he can replicate his order into the app like magic!?]
As you can see in this example, the interview notes are following the flow of the customer conversation, but already makes explicit the problem statement and areas for solution ideation. Pretty nifty, right?
After a day of a dozen interviews, your brain is fried and you probably won’t have enough brain juice left to think creatively. So go with this FLOW and let the framework do the job for you.
