To Promote Innovation, Make Your User The Hero
Today's post comes from Eileen Kaur Alden. Eileen is a screenwriter, comic book creator, and FinTech digital product executive with a passion for innovation and great consumer experiences.
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Great product innovation comes from listening deeply to customers. This can be a harder than it seems!
Products often have tight delivery schedules – it might seem faster to skip the deep customer research and just start building something new. There may be stakeholders with very firm opinions – it can be a difficult to change their minds. And qualitative customer research can be a bit fuzzy – you don’t have the black-and-white clarity of statistics with a large sample size (Ed: which is not to say we shouldn’t be scientific skeptics who play the odds when innovating…).
When I’m faced with these challenges, I have found that my experience writing comic books and screenplays is surprisingly valuable.
Comic books and screenplays are visual mediums, and both are forms of storytelling. In my writing, I design stories that deliver an experience that resonates with my audience. I develop characters with clear motivations and goals. I lay out the character journeys from beginning to middle to end, including conflicts and obstacles they encounter along the way, and ultimately, I deliver a resolution at the end of the story that provides an emotionally engaging outcome.
When listening to customers, I like to frame their experience as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Stories are highly memorable, and especially when combined with visuals, they can be very eye-opening and change a stakeholder’s entrenched opinion. And authentic customer stories can often ring true in an even more compelling way compared to impersonal numbers and statistics.
With a deadline looming and limited time for innovation, turning customer input into a story structure can also create better efficiency. Once you have the story that represents your customer’s current experience, you’re well positioned to re-write the narrative through innovation. You’re ready to re-imagine that customer having a better experience, by placing them into a new story that uses your innovative ideas and product solutions for a better outcome and even happier ending.
*Note: Views expressed in this post are my own and are not associated with my employer.
Related: Enabling Better Decisions Through Emotion-Rich Stories
Related: Listen To Understand
Related: To Empathize, Allow Some Space
Related: Get Scientific
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The quality of our thinking is deeply influenced by the diversity of the inputs we collect. Implementing practices like Brian Grazer’s “Curiosity Conversations” ensures innovators are well-equipped with a variety of high-quality raw material for problem-solving.