Hi everybody!
We met up last week on January 25th at the HEAD with the rest of the team. This meeting was definitely a revelation for the team. It allowed us to have an honest conversation about the frustrations each of us was facing at this point of the adventure.
Everything started with one simple but crucial question:
What’s our minimum viable product and what is it composed of?
Why is this question important now? Because, although we’re collecting positive feedback from potential users, deep down, we are wondering if we are heading in the right direction.
Indeed, in terms of user experience, Romain is wondering what should the user should feel when he’s using the product? And what are we really bringing to the users of our product that makes their life easier or better?
On the other side, it seemed that for engineers, there is a real pressure to deliver a technical prototype as fast as possible especially due to their specific milestones fixed by their supervisor. In addition to this, their schedules are really quite tight which doesn’t allow them too much time to play around.
To answer these important questions, Vignesh and Romain tried to figure out for who the product actually creates value.
- Is it more important to solve the problems of the organizer or the ones of the festival participant?
- Is the product we’re creating going to focus more on bringing location data analytics to the organizer or enhancing the festival experience of the participant?
We realized that the research done by the engineers about location tracking technology as well as the hypothesis validations about our customer segments brought forward by Vignesh only allowed us to optimize existing solutions. Although we had found a cool buzzword to use in our blog, “location intelligence”, there was nothing intelligent about our solution at this point in time.
By pursuing the conversation, we understood that we had focused maybe too much on delivering value to the organizer and not enough to the participant who is also the end-user. We had to come to the conclusion that our solution did not fully enhance a festival if the only one benefitting from it was the organizer. We needed to redefine what it meant to actually enhance a festival experience!
This lack of focus on the end-user of the product, meant that their needs in terms of ergonomics, sensorial and overall user experience did not allow our designers to visualize how the interaction and product design could evolve successfully given the chosen direction.
This is why we have decided that it is now time to experiment and figure out how we can place the festival participant at the center of our product design.
In terms of technological feasibility, we now have a good understanding of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities but what about other technologies which could allow our product to deliver real value to all the stakeholders involved without compromising the needs of a particular group?
The main question now is:
Is there a way to use some of the more obscure technologies such as vibrations to provide navigation information within a festival site? Is there a way to enhance the way we listen to music at live shows?
This coming week, these are the questions that Romain & the engineers will try to answer while Joanne researches which materials are best suited to achieve our goals.
Meanwhile, Vignesh will do his best to reconcile everything that’s going on and develop a clear methodology for our solution interviews.
Stay tuned for more!
Team Ikare