Research Brief: Uncover undeserved needs and motivations and facilitate the generation of product concepts for personal assistant technologies.
Methods: In-depth interviews, Affinity diagramming, Design workshop.
Framing Innovation Through Jobs-To-Be-Done
The Customer Progress-Making Journey. From Alan Klement, http://www.whencoffeeandkalecompete.com
To help frame thinking about customers’ needs, I utilized Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) principles to structure my research approach. The basic premise of the JTBD approach is that customers hire products in order to fulfill an unmet need - or in others words, to “get a job done”. By focusing on what types of progress people want to make in their lives, product teams are able to consider their customers’ needs from a fresh perspective through which they can generate innovative product offerings.
Understanding the progress that people want to make in their lives can be done through storytelling. Specifically, we recruited 14 participants who had recently purchased an Amazon Echo within the past 3 months and probed them to understand what needs and motivations came into play during their purchase-making journey. Following a JTBD approach, we probed the participants on what factors led them want to make a change and what “jobs” they were hoping to get done through adopting the Amazon Echo. Thereby, we could more fully understand what their actual motivations were during their progress-making journey.
What we discovered was surprising. It was clear that the participants did not purchase the Echo to meet any particular unmet functional need. For example, listening to music, catching up on news, or controlling IoT devices using voice were not decisive factors that led to purchase. In many cases, the participants already owned Bluetooth speakers or had other solutions in place that provided these functions. Instead, the main motivating forces that led to adoption were predominantly social.
Uncovering the Real Motivations
Impressing Friends
“The summer came too. We were doing a lot of house parties. Well, not house parties - get togethers. And it’s like a cool show-off piece. I’m not like a show-offy person but, if it’s in the front room, which it’s usually not, but I’ll move it around, er, they’ll see it and be like “what’s that?” and then I can educate them because like I was saying, not a lot of people have these yet.”
By asking participants to retrace their steps through key moments of their purchase journey, we were able to uncover certain motivations that influenced their decisions that may not have been revealed using conventional interviewing processes. For example, in the quote above, through storytelling, the participant was able to remember what was going on in her mind before she had even bought the Amazon Echo, revealing motivations that might not be top-of-mind today. As this and other similar quotes show, Impressing Friends was a key motivation for adopting the technology at that particular time.
Having More Family Time
For participants who had families, the disrupting role of technology in the home was a concern shared by many of the people we spoke to. The addictive nature of personal devices was high in their minds and they were conscious of limiting “screen time” both for themselves and their family members. The Amazon Echo fit in nicely with these particular concerns, as it was seen to be a more humane, social form of interaction that could offload some of the tasks and activities from their personal screen-based devices. Nevertheless, the technology was still fairly immature and left quite a lot to be desired in this regard - in other words, people wanted to do a lot more using voice than they were able to currently.
Make the Home Less Lonely
On the other hand, for those participants living alone, the Amazon Echo held the promise of adding a social element to their homes. They responded positively to marketing that emphasized the playful, jokey and conversational nature of the device. Taken altogether, it was clear that their relationship with the personality of the device was an important factor in arousing interest and motivation towards adopting the technology.
Entertain and Educate My Children
Returning to families, many participants who had children were somewhat surprised at how quickly their children had took to the devices. The Amazon Echo may have been purchased with the intention to be used by the parents but often became primarily a device for the children. This gave the participants a hopeful future vision in which the Amazon Echo could be used to keep their children entertained and also potentially to educate them as well.
Developer Research
As well as conducting interviews with users, I also attended the Mobile Voice Conference in San Jose in 2016 to asked developers about what some of their pain points and needs were in developing skills on the Alexa platform. Although this research was informal, it highlighted some common frustrations that developers faced, including:
A lack of ability to brand the voice or promote 3rd party skills on the Alexa platform.
Amazon did not give 3rd party developers access to the actual speech from users of their skills, and so they have no ability to learn from or anticipate what people will say.
A lack of access to permanent records of interactions makes any financial transactions or commerce difficult or impossible on the platform.
Generating Design Concepts
After conducting the initial research, I facilitated a design workshop with a larger team of designers, developers and product managers to generate product concepts for Mozilla’s entry into the digital assistant space. This involved reviewing the research with Amazon Echo users and developers and synthesizing key jobs, pain points and desired outcomes. Product concepts were generated by triangulating between the user needs, Mozilla’s technology strengths and Mozilla’s company mission and business needs.
Generating design concepts by connecting user, business and technology constraints
Example Concept: The Botfather
An example of one of the concepts generated was called “The Botfather”, which was a concept for a personal assistant that connected users directly with 3rd party chatbots without a centralized gatekeeper. End-users could invoke different bots, each of which would have its own distinct voice and personality that represented the brand that they were connected to. This would bring multiple benefits for users, including simplifying interaction, adding interest through a greater range of personalities, and giving them access to a greater range of services. From the developer perspective, they would have greater flexibility to interact with their customers, beyond what was permissible to them by Amazon.