TibetanTailor

Here is an wonderful example of an issue board. Developed by Anthony Hyun and Dennis Schleicher. We used it last week in a Design Studio exercise. We generated almost 12 new ideas in less than 30 minutes. All participants really enjoyed it and wanted to do more. What was great was that many of the ideas do not involve massive new functionality or features, but would still increase the “loyal customer experience.”

In a bodystorm how do you handle “experts” and “dominant talkers?”
Bodystorming works best when you bring together different people. But what happens when someone is a “expert” and tries to guide the group down only their path.

Dealing with Self appointed experts

• Other people will defer to them SO really set the stage with everyone first putting down what is known about the issue.  It helps to give each body storm group  materials (like an issue board) so that everyone is using the same set of “facts”.
• Underscore the fact that everyone has tacit knowledge that needs to be brought to bear on the issue and they need to talk & ACT in order for their tacit knowledge to be expressed.
• In addition when the people are first introducing each other, try to avoid encouraging responses that would highlight participants level of education, socio-economic status, or amount of experience with the issue.

Dealing with Dominant Talkers

• Spot them in the pre-session small talk and make sure during the body storm you keep a close eye on them and perhaps spend more time with that group in the initial start.
• If that doesn’t work then give them a speaking stick or other object that if you want to speak you have to hold to make it painfully obvious how much one person might be dominating dialogue.

Best is to Set the Stage from the start

• “In body storming exercises like this we know that some people talk a lot or seem to drive the group. It is essential for body storming success to have all of you participate because only through everyone working together does all the tacit individual wisdom get bubbled up and affects other individuals and coalesce in the whole of the body storm.. So if I come over an interrupt to make sure everyone is participating, please don’t be offended. It is just my way of making sure we get good results from your investment in your body storm.”

References

Focus Group Moderation Guides for the same issues

You want more money? More sales? How about having your current customers buy your product(s) more frequently.

Try the Entrainment Recipe (entrainment is about synchronization, alignment between two organisms, systems, etc. It is the dance between your customers’ lives and your webpresence)

A simple approach strategy to increase sales is thus to increase frequency of purchase.

But how do you do that? How to do that within user centered design?

An Entrainment Recipe (A delicious blending of web use sugar and customer life-cycle flour)

Ingredients

1 cup           Good understanding of your customers’ lifecycles
1 pound     Good understanding of how frequent they use your site
2 oz             Design thinking on how to support their lifecycle on your site

1. Find out how frequent do your customers use your website.
2. Find out what your current customers’ “rounds” are. (A daily/weekly/monthly/yearly “round” is the re-occuring cycle of activities.)
3. Determine the current “entrainment” between your customers and your website.
4. Determine what frequency you want to go for (which is of a shorter cycle time than you found in step 1)
5. Figure out how you will support (this might involve new features, functions, or even product/service assortments.)

Basically, If you first look at the activities that your customers are doing (their frequency), then figure out in which ways you can entrain your website with what your customers are doing on a more frequent cycling than what they are currently doing.

So, give this recipe and I’d love to hear how it tastes to you.

Examples

• Perhaps you have a payment schedule that occurs on a monthly basis, why not entrain your users with that monthly cycle. WOW!
• A sad example thought might be those ISPs that try to falsely entrain the users with e-mail use. Yet that is more of a interrruption tactic, whereas google uses a more subtle associated tactic.
• Look back to my diagram connecting Structure, Function, and Process, you can see how to show the relationship between customer activities and web presence.

References

How do you measure frequency of purchase?

Entrainment definitions in Wikipedia (a variety)

In order to help you do better bodystorming one thing I have found helpful is building an issue board. Below is an example of an issue board. Then a diagram of how the overall board is organized. Lastly, how each radian decomposes from the Issue through concepts to each of the individual forms. Go to the Issue Board Page to see my thinking behind this.

The Benefits of the Issue Board for bodystorming are:

• Helps us to more fully align the success of the product/service with the needs, desires, and success of the customers.
• Focused on the BIG DEEPR ISSUE to give us PROFOUND INSIGHTS & INTERPRETATIONS
• Help the company to understand what is truly meaningful in relation to complex human issues of culture, lifestyle, culture, and values.

Now to show you how the issue board is organized.

Here is how you choose each of the images. the logic behind each of the images and the structural relationship.

How to know if you are out of touch with your customers. Can your company’s executives pass this 5-step test? Get 6 executives (preferably high up mucky-mucks.)

1. Find 3 regular customers who use your store.
2. Pair 2 executives with 1 customer.
3. You can even let those executive interview the customers for 30 minutes.
4. Then the 2 executives go online or in store, pick out, purchase and give a gift to the customer they talked to.
5. Then have the customer speak about the gift, if it was an appropriate choice, if they liked it, what they liked about it, what it means to them, etc.

Impacts from this test:

• To check what the execs know (and didn’t know, and learned) their customers.
• To see the executives figure out ways (the questions to ask is just one limited way to learn their customer likes/dislikes/interests) to learn customers wants, needs, interests, desires, and aspirations.

 Now, if you delight in imagining subjecting your execs to this sadistic exercise, hold on a minute.  Before you sick the “real customer” hounds on your executives, you better do this yourself first. Drink your own soup. WARNING: HOT SOUP!

References
Based on an idea I heard from Karen Holtman  who attended EPIC09 in Chicago and revealed this plus lots of other idea nuggets on how to be a “guide to” instead of an “expert on” your company’s customers.