We distinguished users, customers and markets.
- Users are the actual individuals who make use of a product
- Customers are (individuals, often representing entities) who make a purchasing decision or set out the requirements for a purchase of a product. Customers may be distinct from buyers if the purchasing agent takes instruction from a different department's requirements.
- Markets are aggregates of potential customers. Often markets are segmentations by vertical industry or by geography or by customer (or user) demographics.
In this exercise we focus on users and customers.
We compared several playful techniques that encourage communication within a (product or engineering or...) team from techniques that gather feedback and ideas from users or customers. We differentiated the engineering team version of "Design the Box" as developed by Bill Shackleford and described by Jim Highsmith in Joel Spolsky's blog several years ago. (external link)
We played Product Box, one of twelve Innovation Games® (external link). We started with the question, "How can we engage with young people about healthy sexual behavior using interesting technology solutions?" as the focus of the game, as a way of featuring sex::tech, a conference coming up in January 2008. Obviously, any organization can use these techniques to get customer and user responses to its own products or services.
Even in this very foreshortened version of the game, we got amazing results and had fun!
Photos are now posted.
Our de-brief focused on acknowledging and appreciating
- The differences among the approaches each person took in choices of
Audience addressed,
Solutions proposed (games, information packets mailed in plain white boxes, advertising...)
Materials employed
- The role of observers in the play and results from observations
- Next steps
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