Integrative Workshop, Spring 2011

School of Information @ University of California, Berkeley

Reflections on the ‘User Experience’ lecture

Filed under: Posts and Blogs — Saghar at 5:49 am on Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Everyone,

Thanks to Nancy and Tapan for leading the discussion of the user experience side to the integrative workshop.

And we got to design some prototypes for the next generation of ODL! Photos of the designs will be up on the course webpage shortly.

It was very interesting to learn how tightly connected the user experience issues are to the business model ones.

Which way does it work?

a) Business model => data collection on users

b) Data collection on users => business model

a) It is difficult to get traction on user research if you don’t know anything about your business model (value proposition, pain points). To start with, you need to know who the users are and, as Nancy said, there are many different kinds of parents–all users are not alike.  So some business model decisions are necessary upfront.

b) Yet, what you learn from user research may alter or even radically transform your business model. You may discover that certain users don’t want it, or that some want it but for different purposes (e.g., not to track health but to create a diary and share photos on facebook!). That suddenly changes the value proposition, the “pain point” or need, and ways to monetize (now advertising may look more attractive).

The upshot: these issues are tightly linked, and figuring this out requires a process of iteration, back and forth between business model and user research and prototyping.

That means that the process is highly experiential (vs. just analytical) and that the end point is likely to be very different from the first idea.

Best regards, Morten

1 Comment

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Comment by George Queen

April 25, 2011 @ 6:15 am

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