Basics

How to find new promising opportunities?

When you are interested in a new field but don't know much about it, and want to discover and get inspired.

main steps

01

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Hypothesis Generation

01

Explore brand new horizons

Gather with your team to generate hypothesis around the needs and behaviours of a defined audience group, and ideate on what type of solutions could address those needs. Combine existing knowledge around that specific market with personal intuitions, clustering the emerging hypothesis into key assumptions and initial concepts to be verified during the research.

tips

Techniques like what if provocations or how might we statements may help come up with hypothesis to work on.

02

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Research Plan

02

Carefully prepare to go in the field

Plan a field study to discover more about your target audience and challenge, validate or refine the initial hypothesis. Building a plan help define a goal and set of methodologies for your research, a recruiting strategy to find the right participants, as well as key locations and timeline. Once it’s done, you will know all the logistic details needed to conduct the fieldwork.

tips

Be creative in your recruiting to engage highly-motivated participants. Social networks and online traces may help :)

03

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Interview Guide

03

Turn the assumptions into questions

The in-depth interview is the most precious technique whenever you are conducting a research aimed at understanding user values, met or unmet needs and less known behaviours. Write down a detailed interview guide to consolidate a structure for the individual interviews, and be ready to build on each participant’s answers to develop a deeper and deeper understanding.

tips

Hands-on exercises help better engage the participants when dealing with very abstract or sensitive topics.

04

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Personas

04

Cluster your insights around user-types

When back from the research, map out all your insights and the key differences in the behaviours you encountered. You can use personas to group participants with similar characteristics and tell stories about them, describing in detail their approach, needs, problems, and potentially also their existing journeys.

tips

Build a four by four map displaying the different personas help explain them by highlighting their main differences.

05

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Offering Map

05

Craft the best strategy to move forward

Translate the needs and behaviours into design opportunities and start generating ideas for new services or service features. Building a map of all the emerged opportunities helps giving an overview of all the interesting directions to work on, and reflect on the overall strategy before further ideating or developing one specific opportunity.

tips

Print out a big poster displaying the opportunity map as starting point to come up with ideas under each opportunity.