Human-centered design (HCD) at its core is designing a product around how a person would actually use it. What can often happen during the design phase of a product is the product team is focused around a great solution, new technology, or process, but doesn’t think about how a person would actually use it. Additionally, other factors may come into play to help sell the product such as a cool UI or competitive price point. However, when someone is actually using the product, thoughts about how cool the interface is or the great deal that they got, go right out of the window. Poor HCD can cause a poor user experience (UX) and customers may not continue to use your product, or worse, move to a competitor.
One technique to counteract poor HCD is to focus on a customer pain point. Thinking of customer pain points is no joke, but we can use techniques that comedians use to write jokes to help us put on our “customer hat”. While comedians make us laugh, many fans don’t realize that some of the best comedy actually comes from a place of anger and pain. Coincidentally, some of the best product ideas also come from places of anger or pain. So how do you tap into these emotions to enable you to think of good pain points? In her book, “ The Comedy Bible: From Stand-up to Sitcom--The Comedy Writer’s Ultimate “How To” Guide, author Judy Carter has a formula for writing a great joke that starts with choosing attitude words. The words are: weird, scary, hard, and stupid. Attitude words give jokes the emotion and energy that enables a comedian to connect with their audience. For example, “Isn’t it weird how….”, “What’s scary about X is…”,”What’s hard about being X is...”. Starting jokes with these attitude words can help comedians think of more relatable ideas.
Let’s look at a product example. My favorite non-technical product is my acoustic guitar. I use it every day, it’s pretty intuitive (strum the strings, make a noise), but how could I improve it?
What’s hard about acoustic guitars is learning the names of the notes for the entire fretboard and what strings to play to get those notes.
What’s scary about acoustic guitars is the process of changing out strings. How do I know that I’m doing it correctly and when should I change them out?
What’s weird about acoustic guitars is that you can only really play them in a small setting without amplification.
What’s stupid about acoustic guitars is the damage that they can do to your fingers when you practice every day.
From these examples, you can begin to see how by using attitude words in your own brainstorming sessions you can come up with great product ideas. For example, what if we add an app to the acoustic guitar that shows a player the letter name of the note they played. What if we could also alert a customer when their strings need to be changed out. If the customer is pressing the strings too hard, maybe we can use pressure sensors to ensure the most optimal string pressure for the note. Now some guitar purists would argue that you no longer have an acoustic guitar, but that’s for a different blog post. Hopefully, this idea can help during your next brainstorming session or even your next open mic.
Recommended Reading
The Comedy Bible: From Stand-up to Sitcom--The Comey Writer’s Ultimate “How To” Guide https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B003IQ161K&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_RF1BFbYG9XCTV