A Lab in Amsterdam
November 27, 2006 – 9:28 am
The run of launch events for the BBC Labs has been interrupted by a week in Amsterdam where I was directing an Innovation Lab for the Media Guild. The event is described by Esther Weltevrede here. A prize of €10,000 was on offer for the winning project pitched on the final day.
As usual when we started the 5 day process some of the proposals were vague or unfocused propositions, technological solutions to meet undefined needs or problems. The mentoring team of Andrew Bullen, Tracy Currer, Tom Demeyer, Janine Huizenga and Humberto Schwab took the projects through a series of exercises designed to refine and develop them.
In each case one of the most useful techniques was to the teams to tell plausible stories about specific users, describing credible contexts in which people would use the services and applications they were developing. Tracy organised and lead the day on users, providing a set of tools for scenario-building:
A Day in the Life
- Offline, online, social, hobbies
- The context of ‘using your thing’ daily
1 year, 2 year, 3 year, 5 year
- evolution
- small steps
- scalability
- growing user sophistication
Micro needs
- Break macro needs up
- Focus on small instances
- What is the user’s ‘call to action’
Focus on Scenario Key Frames
- A - Activity
- E - Environment
- I - Interaction
- O - Object
- U – User
User modes
- Activity or behaviour based categorisation
- Transcends specific user
- Abstracting out patterns of behaviour
- Create focus/opportunity.
As it turned out, the jury awarded the prizes to the two projects that had the clearest and most focused personas and accounts of ‘user journeys’ at the end of the Lab.