Effective Ideation & Immersion
The deeper relationship between immersion and ideation depicting how it leads to a better understanding of the user and his pain points, needs.
“Every successful product you see today started from an idea”
In more technical terms, idea could also be referred to as Hypothesis. Hypothesis / Ideas can be literally generated from any source either directly / indirectly linked to the product in question.
“Hypothesis” is just a fancy way of saying “Idea”.
– Steve Blank.
The common roots of such ideas / hypotheses would be: -
Verbatims / User reviews on public domain
Customer-facing teams’ (Sales, Support, Marketing) inputs
User Feedback collected directly by Product / Tech teams
Stakeholder inputs – feature requests
Studying Analytics – funnel analysis pointing at pain points
Internal teams (Product, Tech, Dev et. al.)
Be it a new product launch / feature addition, moving forward briskly and directly jumping from hypothesis to solutioning / build stage may prove to be costly for orgs. and could lead to either a terribly undercooked product or a product that partially satisfies the users.
And, that is the reason why a decision to subject a hypothesis to proper validation from the field becomes critical at various levels which is what led to the backbone of modern day Discovery.
Generally some team members who would be involved in this discovery process are:
Product Manager(s)
Users / Representatives of the User groups
UX Team Members (in some cases)
Developers (in some cases)
When there are many ways to conduct these discovery activities, they all point to finding answers to one or more of these questions:
Problems – What problems are the users facing?
Magnitude
Qualitative – How big do the users perceive this problem to be?
Quantitative – How many users face a similar problem?
Frequency – How frequently is it getting in the way of their regular workflow?
So, a regular discovery activity can be thought as evaluating / validating those ideas generated by conducting time-based experiments with an aim to unearth facts and find support (validation) to those theories.
The output of an exhaustively conducted discovery would lead to a thorough and deeper multi-dimensional understanding of the user often represented via the Empathy Map. (See fig. below)
Image Source: https://www.hrbartender.com/2020/employee-engagement/employee-experience-empathy-maps/
And the process through which teams gets closer to understanding & defining problem is called Immersion.
Teams essentially would conduct dive-in sessions to firstly find and then explore the problem in detail from the perspective of both the users and the organisation.
Naturally. The deeper the Immersion and the multiple levels it could be subjected to, the better would be the understanding leading to building a detailed Empathy Map.
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