Jon Kolko,

Austin Center for Design

 

an early entrepreneur, the lines between product, brand, and sales are very fuzzy.

We teach students to tell stories about how they will reach customers, how they will communicate the promise of their product, and how they will react to issues like customer service or support.

Role playing and method acting help students explore various scenarios by urging them to consider non-perfect situations that are sure to arise (“What happens if you put up a website and no one visits it?” or “What happens when someone wants a refund?”).

• React to a deadline. We create an artificial sense of urgency by requiring that students acquire one engaged customer by a certain deadline (typically within two weeks), and that they consider that flagship customer as a co-designer. Engaged means they are trading their resources—their time or money—in order to recognize the value provided by the service. Without such a deadline, students work to polish and polish their idea, never considering that it may be the wrong idea, the wrong manifestation of the idea, or the wrong communication of the idea.

• Scale. We create additional urgency by requiring that students identify and acquire 10 subsequent customers by another deadline, typically six weeks after the start of the quarter. This requires students to explore both traditional and nontraditional forms of advertising and networking, as well as other ways of articulating their value proposition to a potential audience.

• Build a financial model. While
students are working to acquire
customers, they are also refining a
business model that focuses on pricing,
customer acquisition, and business
expenditures (salaries, rent, utilities),
in order to understand the scale
Most recently, designers have utilized
behavioral research to identify levers
for engagement or to support behavior
change through service design.

As designers now find themselves in product management roles in entrepreneurial contexts, there is a new way we can leverage our user-centeredness: in understanding if the products and services we are making are valuable. Just as a user test is a way of assessing usability, a pilot test can be a way to assess value—to understand if people find your product valuable and are willing to spend their resources (money and time) to use or experience it. Value is a measure of worth, but it’s more complicated than simple utility, because value is relative to both a user’s context and a larger market landscape.

To be user-centered in assessing value, designers must consider an array of attributes (like awareness, immediacy, delivery channel, and brand promise) not typically part of their creative sphere of influence or training.

Students of design typically learn
methods, process, and theory in order
to conduct usability testing and assess
usability. They can also learn methods,
Students at Austin Center for Design
spend three quarters leveraging a
user-centered design approach to build
a new product or service, and then
spend their fourth quarter planning
and conducting an entrepreneurial
pilot study. Over eight weeks, students
follow a process that looks like this:
• Create a form of prototype,
suitable for use. As a prerequisite,
students need to build a manifestation
of their vision. Sometimes this
includes working code or actual built-
out technology. More frequently, it
includes creative human shortcuts that
simulate technology. For example, one
group envisioned a tool to help K- 12
educators communicate with parents
through automated SMS messages.
Rather than build a functioning
automated server to send and receive
these messages, the team manually
sent text messages from their personal
phones each day at a certain time. It’s
clearly not a scalable solution, but it
allowed the team to focus their time
on other aspects of the tool, such as the
user interface or service model.

• Identify target users and buyers, recognizing they may not be the same people. Many of the services developed by students realize their value by connecting multiple constituents or stakeholders, such as teachers and parents, or healthcare professionals and patients. We urge students to establish a clear definition of who will use and benefit from the product, and who will pay for it.

• Tell an engagement and go-to-
market story. Students often view their
work as self-explanatory—that the
value and allure of what they have made
will be obvious to people, and that it
will spread organically and quickly. As
Running an Entrepreneurial Pilot
to Identify Value

INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG 22 INTERACTIONS JULY–AUGUST2014 COLUMN BODONI, BAND-SAWS, AND BEER