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.
***
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
Join over 7,847 creators & leaders who read Paint & Pipette each week
AI isn't coming for your job. But someone using AI almost certainly is. So why not take your own job before someone else does? It’s time to prioritize and systematize disrupting ourselves.