Once you've identified some prospective end-
users you want to study, you could
start asking the following questions to characterize them.
They fall into three broad categories--
demographics, motivation, and behavior.
Demographic questions would be questions
such as the following: What's their gender?
What's their age range?
What's their income range?
What's their geographic location?
Questions about motivation are, what motivates them?
What do they fear most in the world?
Who's their hero?
Questions about behavior are, where do they go for vacation?
Where do they go for dinner?
Where do they go before work?
What newspapers do they read?
What websites?
What TV shows do they watch?
What are their watering holes?
Because you don't want to have to go
find these people up in the woods,
because that's really hard.
You want to find them down at their watering holes.
That's much more efficient.
Ultimately, in all of these, you're looking to find out what
makes them special and identifiable and de-selects
other people so that if you see a potential candidate,
you could say, it fits within our end-user profile,
or it doesn't.
And it shouldn't be too so broad that everyone you see
fits in that profile.
Remember, this is not a complete list,
nor do these criteria apply in all situations.
You need to customize this for your situation.
But let me tell you, this will give you a good start.
More likely, your process will be iterative.
With each new end-user interview,
you will learn new and important questions to ask other people.
And you'll get a more and more refined end-user profile.
How did you identify the first people
to learn more about the problem and then
eventually to test your prototypes?
So first, I started observing my friend who's
visually impaired, how he interacts with the watch he was
wearing, either the talking watch
or the tactile analog watch.
And then I was curious enough to ask,
if they cannot see the watches they're wearing,
how do they tell time?
I mean, this is called "watch" maybe
because you have to watch this to know the time.
So when you were talking to your friend who has poor eyesight,
what questions did you ask him?
You mentioned that you asked them about the kinds of watches
that he has.
What else did you ask about?
What else were you curious about?
So first, I noticed that the watch that he was wearing
was just really bad-looking.
So I asked him, "Do you like your watch?"
And he said "No."
And he said he oftentimes even preferred
not wearing a watch when he dresses up, because he knows
that this talking watch, it just looks cheap and bad.
So oftentimes when he dresses up,
he prefers getting lost to know what time it is,
than looking bad by wearing that.
That's incredible.
Yes.
So in the beginning, it was a lot of cold emails.
So basically just Googling the blind community
or organizations that serve the blind.
A randomly contacted people through LinkedIn and Facebook,
and Twitter.
So if you go into the LinkedIn, you can,
based on their job descriptions and their locations
and their photos, you can kind of
tell how old they are, where they
are located, their occupations, and even sometimes
their sense of style.
And I sent them the same message to all of them, saying,
here's our products.
It's a fashion timepiece that you
don't have to look at to tell time.
You began speaking earlier about reaching out
to centers who work with people who are visually impaired.
Continue the thought.
So I had a big list, a long list of organizations
that serve the blind.
And I basically emailed them, I called them.
And in the beginning, the response rate
was pretty low, which I understand,
because I only had the concept in mind.
I didn't have a physical actual prototype to show them.
And most of the organizations, the big organizations,
they get tons of calls and emails from people
like me to ask for a partnership and for user feedback sessions.
And so it was really hard to get their attention.
So we started with really small self-organized organizations.
So one of the organizations was VIBUG, Visually Impaired
and Blind User Groups.
They meet every once a month, and people
who are visually impaired living in the Massachusetts area.
So each meeting, they have about 40 to 50 members coming in.
Most of them are visually impaired,
but they have some members who are not
visually impaired, like me.
And they were very supportive in terms
of taking their time for me to do the user feedback sessions.
Most of the products, when they developed the prototype,
they have nice images, 3D images and graphics.
So they just show it to a group of people all at once,
and then they receive the feedback,
the written feedbacks.
But since our target audience was
those who are visually impaired, none of those images
or descriptions, written descriptions, none of them
worked.
So the only way I could get feedback from them
was to make a physical prototype like this and bring it to them
one by one.
Presenting this in front of a group, it doesn't work.
So I literally have to go knock on the door
to meet with them individually.
One meeting, it takes about at least one hour.
I think I've meant about close 100 people who
are visually impaired.
And I've made a whole bunch of these
so that I can pass around 10 of these all at the same time.
So I collect their feedbacks.
And even if I make a really slight improvements
in these iterations, I have to make
another whole set of physical prototypes
and again, do the whole thing over and over again,
bringing the new iterations to them and say,
"Hey, is this what you meant with your feedback?"
Is this correct designs that you wanted?
We went through more than 50 iterations.
This persistence, this patients, these iterations,
this dedication to truly listening to your end-users
creates the foundation that you will
need to achieve a breakthrough like Hyungsoo.
The first thing that I found out from talking
with many different blind user groups
is that they care a lot about the designs and fashions
and the styles of the products they use or wear.
The stereotype that I had towards them was they
would not care about the design so much,
as long as it works well for them.
I was totally wrong.
I felt very ignorant after I found out.
One of the first questions they ask in most of the user group
meetings was about the size and the style,
the design, even the colors, because they are equally
conscious about the styles of what they wear
and what they use.
If I think about it now, why would they
not care about the designs or the styles of what they use
or wear?
Now, if people are visually impaired, how can
they perceive the style of something?
How can they perceive the color of something?
And how does that become important to them?
They interact with all different people.
They don't live with blind community only.
Their families are mostly sighted.
And their friends are sighted.
They have teachers, and a lot of them who work full-time,
their coworkers are sighted.
Their daily conversation is the same.
Having a friend who is visually impaired in your dinner table,
it doesn't mean that your conversation
is going to change just because of him.
You have the same daily conversations.
He's part of it.
He or she has a really good sense
of what's hot or following the trends.
Let me tell you a product that I use often.
I go to Legal Seafoods.
It's a restaurant right here in Kendall Square next to MIT.
I love Legal Seafoods.
It's a place that's very friendly when I get there.
The maitre d' is always saying hello.
They always have a good table for me.
They know I want to do business at lunch.
I want to talk to important people.
I can go there every day.
There's great variety of food.
And it's healthy.
And when people come in from out of town,
they love to go to Legal Seafoods
because it's a place that's quintessentially Boston.
So if I think about that, I can build an end-user profile
of people like myself that want to go to Legal Seafood.
I will in fact pay a premium to go to Legal Seafood,
because I want not just the food,
but I want the whole package, the whole solution.
And when they do such a good job, as they do,
I tell other people about it, and I go back there.
That's why I'm a frequent customer of Legal Seafood.
And I'm a powerful end-user profile for their business.
Now, let's do an exercise.
Think about a product that you buy often,
and ask yourself, why?
What makes you buy this product?
Now, what you're going to do is build
an end-user profile of yourself.
Describe yourself in detail.
Focus on factors that you think contribute strongly
to the reasons why you buy this product.
Think of others like yourself who would buy the same product.
Do they fit in a homogeneous group with you?
That would be an end-user profile.