 Thank you all for being here. My name is Diane Zajak. As I mentioned my Twitter handle is agile squirrel. The hashtag for the conference is Agile India 2019. If you are tweeting, please include those. I'm gonna start you off this morning doing some activity. So pull out your phone, laptop, iPad, something you have handy. Okay, pull out your device, and I want you to grab a piece of paper whether it's a post-it or a scratch pad that you have and jot down two or three things that you never ever use on your iPhone or cell phone or other device. So look at your device, scroll through some of the things, jot down two or three things that you never ever use. I'll give you just a minute to do that. Yep, it's on your phone, but you never use it. That's why you actually have to pull out your device because you probably don't even know it's there. So flip through to that last page that you never go to and jot down the things, a couple of examples of things you never use. You're gonna be doing a lot of writing and thinking today, so we'll get you started right off the bat. Whichever, however you want to qualify it. Just infrequent use, almost never use. Okay, hopefully you've got a couple things written down. Now I want you to think about who might use that. So just silently jot down next to those items and who might have actually found that thing useful. Get creative, think about all the types of people out there in the world. They must have been thinking of someone when they built that thing, even if not you. Okay, looks like everyone's done writing. Now do me a favor and turn to the person next to you and share your list with them. So you each get about a minute to tell them a couple of the things, tell them who you were thinking of. If there's an odd number at your table, talk in groups of three. Okay, hopefully you've traded, so both of you have had a chance to share your list. Who wants to share something from their own list or something they heard from their partner? Hi, I'm Vidya. I think both of us have similar. So I found a fine phone, fine friends, mail, I mean wallet and tips I've never used on my iPhone. So I think he's also having similar stuff and the reason probably we thought like fine friends, maybe if they're a nice, I don't know, if you're active in social media. That's what I thought, but now that's so irrelevant in today's context. Yeah, thank you. Anyone else want to share one? Hi, I marked Twitter because you easily get hooked up to that and in my, at least my point of view, you lose lots of time. And then who would you actually use it? So I wrote Agile Squirrel. Perfect example. So he wouldn't use Twitter because it's a, it takes a lot of time, but someone like me might use it since he knows that I have an active Twitter handle. So there is one app in my mobile. I installed it and the app is get six peg apps in six months. But, but I never used it and I want to use it, but I never used it. Oh, that's perfect. Thank you. So I'm sure you, you get the theme of what we're talking about. We are here to talk about how to build more useful software when we look at the definition of useless, something that is not fulfilling or not expected to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome. Those apps you mentioned and the many more that weren't mentioned to you, they are useless. They don't achieve any purpose for you. And the technique we're going to learn today, we're going to talk through a small way to get to know the customers we're building for a little bit better in the hopes that what we're building for them is a little bit more useful. We are constantly as humans overcoming a lot of biases and prejudice when we are building software. We tend to think about what we would find useful, what we would want, even when we, we know it's not for us. There's this phenomenon called an empathy gap where we underestimate the feelings of others going through something that we haven't gone through or aren't currently going through. So there's, there's always something that we can think of. The picture of the dog is because I've never had pets. Many people I know have animals and if a co-workers of mine, if their dog dies, I feel bad for them. I can support them. I can encourage them, but I don't really know what they feel like. And I tend to underestimate the impact of that to them. So in a couple of days, I might start saying, why are they still sad about their dog? It's just a dog because I've not experienced that. Think of people you know who have kids and you, if you don't have kids and they just keep talking about, and you don't understand it, you don't quite understand the, the pain of what they're going through because you've never experienced that. There's lots of examples of things where we don't, we can't relate. So what we're trying to do with this technique is kind of bridge that gap. We want to get inside our customers' heads a little bit, understand them a little bit more. And one of the reasons we work in groups to do this, is because we can take our collective experiences and overcome our individual biases. And that's, that's helpful. As long as we avoid group think and not just agree with the people next to us, you're going to see today, we're going to do a combination of silent brainstorming and then sharing out. And we do that to try to avoid anchoring, because when you hear other people sharing out loud, it tends to anchor our thinking and we might be hesitant to mention something or we tend to agree just to kind of make things go easier. So we're going to do a combination of silent brainstorming and then sharing out a little bit of what you just did this morning. So why did I lose my slide? Grab a post-it. I know what we're supposed to be doing here. Give me a second to replay this. Grab a post-it and before I do group activities, I like to do this exercise, especially with groups who have never worked together before. So if you think about yourself at a meeting, you want to give yourself a score, a grade of one to five. One means you mostly listen. Two is I talk what I'm asked. Three, I talk in most meetings. Four, I talk first. Five is I might interrupt other people. So just quietly, all you want to do is put one number on a sticky. The range between one and five. So five is the most talkative. One is the least talkative. And it's not good or bad. There's no judgment around it. I probably shouldn't have called it grade because it's not like you're better or worse. It's just a number. Take five seconds. It's gut level. How would you think about yourself? How would you rate yourself? Yep, right now. If you were in a meeting right now, how would you describe yourself? So everyone have a number on a sticky? All right, so share at your table. Just show others your number. And let me say, raise your hand if you're a three. OK, I want you to cross off that three and make it a two or a four. Because almost none of us are threes. But we like to think we're threes because that seems to be the polite one on the chart. It's OK. This is a safe space. We want to be honest with those around us. So cross out that three, make it a two or a four. There's no embarrassment in being who we are and we have natural tendencies. So were you able to look at your team members when you share them? What I want to encourage you to do today is the number ones and twos. Maybe we let them share out first because they're going to tend to hold back. They're going to tend to wait for everyone else to talk. And just being aware of the numbers of the people around us helps to kind of even out the playing field. Most fives don't think of themselves as the person who talks all the time. But when you point it out and kind of remind yourself that the start of an activity, it can help make space for everyone to participate. So I like to do this whenever I do group activities. All right. So for the rest of today, or this workshop, we're going to pretend that we all work at a company that sells airline tickets. So we're going to be building some new software for some kind of activity around purchasing airline tickets. And before we do that, we need to know who we're going to be building for. So get some post-its. And I want you each to write down two or three different personas. And this is really lightweight. Enough, a couple words that would fit on a post-it. A couple examples there. A grandma booking for her grandson and maybe a weekly business traveler. So we want to generate some ideas of people who might be booking airline tickets because we can't do this activity until we hone in on one. So we want to gather a couple of ideas right now. So write down two or three, one per sticky. Get creative. Think about the people you interact with on a daily basis. Who might be purchasing an airline ticket? Or think about the last time you flew and the people around you. What might their situations have been? Why they booked a ticket? Finish up the one you're working on now. And what we're going to do next is just go around your table, read out one at a time and place it in the middle of your table. So at the end of this exercise, you'll have a pool of different personas in the middle. Get rid of any duplicates in case someone had the same thing that you had. So we'll start out with this pool and then we're going to do a little prioritization technique next. So just take a couple of minutes to share them out and create a pool of them. Okay, finish up what you're doing. Get them all read out in the middle there. Now we're going to do the next step. I want to show you a quick exercise to prioritize these stickies. So you should have two pieces of flip-tart paper on your table. If one person could take a marker and draw circles that look like this target on that paper. So the middle circle should be big enough to hold one sticky. You can kind of see where I'm going with this. That middle circle is going to be only big enough to hold one sticky and then just draw some concentric circles going out from that target. Yeah, it can have three or four circles. It doesn't matter that much as far as how many circles. Yeah, so three or four circles is fine. Everyone's looking good. Okay. So what we're going to do next is... I lost my next slide again. I don't know why this keeps happening. Let me redo this, replay. I'm going to give you some instructions. Now it may look complicated, but it's simpler than it seems. You're basically going to take turns around your table. Each of you will have a turn to take one of those personas that you have a pool of, and you can either put it on that bullseye with the most important spot being in the middle. If someone else already put something in the middle and you really wanted to do this other persona, you can choose to move their persona outside of the middle. So you can either place one on the circle or you can move one within the circle. If you move one, make a little statement about why you moved it. So if someone has a weekly business traveler in the middle circle and you would prefer to do something more family oriented, then you can move it to another range on that circle. So the further away you are from the middle, the least important that one is to you. So at the end of this exercise, you end up with a bullseye that has a bunch of different stickies on it with the middle one being the most important. Only one will go in the middle. We'll keep going around until we either run out of time or all the post-its are removed. So pick your favorite ones. For today's session, we're just thinking about what's your favorite, which is the one you think would be the most interesting to talk about today. You can imagine in real life this matters more because we're looking at business reasons and what we are passionate about. But we've got a question up front here. So the question was, do we negotiate? Now I would intentionally not talk while doing this because if you start negotiating, this would take an hour. It could take an hour, which is sort of how I developed this idea because I was working with people who wouldn't stop debating and talking about everything. And it turns out you can understand people's intentions and opinions without them having to say a word because they will move the sticky that they find important either in or out of that middle circle. So try to do it silently. I do like to give people a chance to have a little bit of a sentence if they are moving something out so we learn a little bit more. But you don't need to negotiate. Just see what happens by just placing them. I'm going to put the rules back up here. There you go. The rules are back up on the screen if you need to see them. I would go one by one around your table. The center circle should only be able to hold one sticky. If you are taking the sticky out of the center circle, you can't put another one in on that turn. You can either add a sticky or remove a sticky. Don't overthink the process. Read one that sounds interesting to you and place it somewhere on the circle. Raise your hands if you don't have a persona in the middle of your bullseye. Looks like everyone has at least someone in the middle. Let's call time. I'm going to give you another couple of minutes. We had someone who hasn't even had a turn yet. I'll give you another minute. Try to wrap up. Let's have everyone take a seat. Everyone should have at least one posted there in our bullseye. That's going to be our focus for today. Hopefully you all had a chance to prioritize your favorite. Let's hear from a few tables what personas we're going to be talking about today. It's too late to be moving them. I've called time. Any last minute switches. Who do you have in the middle of your bullseye? We have a bulk trip based on a request from us. For a holiday trip we are taking the service of a travel agency who will book for a bulk. Thank you very much. What did your table end up as your persona? We have the family trip. When you told what is important for us maybe the frequencies might differ but what is important for us matters. Perfect. Have everyone's attention please. I'll stay on the same course here. What persona did you end up with over here in the middle? A person with special needs. Someone who might be visually impaired or any other kind of physical impairment. This technique sort of organically grew from sitting through meetings that last hours and hours where people debate their opinions about what we should be working on. Participating in something like this, silently what sometimes happens if there is a two options that people you start to see someone keeps taking that out of the middle and someone keeps putting that back in the middle when it's their turn. If that keeps happening that's a sign for us that that's what we should be talking about. We don't need to talk about the 27 options that we have. Let's talk about the ones that actually have some contention around them. It helps us focus in on what are the important things that we should actually be discussing. Quick little exercise, once you practice it a little bit, this can be done with anything. Whether you're talking about user stories or the next market that you're going to be going to in terms of some kind of sales initiative. For our purposes you all have a persona that you're going to be working on or working with for the rest of this workshop. I need a fresh piece of flip chart paper for each table. You should have another one there. We're going to be looking at this which is called the empathy map canvas. Dave Gray of X-Plane created this canvas. It's evolved a bit over the years with similar features that have been consistent. It basically talks us through different aspects of what our customer might be going through. We're going to go through each of those today. I want to emphasize that this does not replace talking to people. We're going to go through this exercise today and align ourselves. Your table will have a good understanding of who this customer might be based on what you know, but I want to emphasize that it doesn't replace talking to people. It's going to help us figure out what assumptions we might need to go confirm what research we need to do, and it helps us align as a team. I recommend doing this at the start of an initiative or at some point when you are going to be switching focus from one customer to another because that's when we need to get out of our heads the last person we were working with or thinking about and switch gears to a new person and working together helps us align on that. The best drawer at the table, if that's a word, the person who can draw the best, I lost my slide again, let me play again, is going to draw this blank canvas. It's not hard, it looks a little intimidating, but just draw out a square, draw ahead. I know you can do it, I've run this workshop dozens of times and everyone is able to draw something that looks like that. So on one of your, no one's ever failed at this. So grab one of your pieces of paper and someone be brave and draw this square with these angles. You can see the important components of the mouth is open to here, the eyes are open to here, so someone do a quick sketch of that on that big piece of paper. I'll give you a few seconds to do that. No laughing at their drawing. Does everybody have a piece of paper? Yeah, try to use the whole piece of paper because we're going to be filling it with sticky notes. So the bigger the better. That looking good. Yep, just draw the eyes and it looks good. These are so good you're going to want to take them home and hang them in your house. It looks good. I've had some groups who end up drawing hair on the person and earrings and they start to embellish their center human head. Looking good. Put the final touches on this person. It looks good. Turns out humans aren't silent. Absolutely. If you email me, and I appreciate that. If you email me later, I can send you links to different research that has been done to show the benefits of silent brainstorming. I have a whole other talk that's all about silence. It's different silent techniques to help people collaborate and communicate even more effectively. So while I appreciate that it feels very natural to be saying lots of words, I have never been on a team where more words equals better communication. So I appreciate the comment and would love to share more information, but it's definitely, there's a whole other talk for that. Alright, so hopefully you all have your map written out. You each should have a pad of stickies in front of you because as we said, we're going to do some silent brainstorming and the first kind of quadrant that we're going to fill in is this top... What did I do? Is the top one, if you can imagine, it is just a descriptor. Something... What I want you to think about while I figure this out is who we're empathizing with. So you want to put... I don't think I stepped on anything. Oh, it's the projector. Well, put your persona in the top left corner of the... Yes, so your sticky of your persona could kind of go in this general area. And then you want to describe them a bit. So you want to jot down... Let me ask the questions so I can prompt you. What is the situation they're in? What is the role of their situation? So describe them a little bit more because on the sticky, if it just says like you had family going on vacation, okay, maybe where do they want to go? Is it an annual vacation? Do they go every quarter somewhere? Are they traveling somewhere they've never been to before? So basically dig into the details a little bit more of this persona. And for this, let's not do it silently because we want to kind of get through this a little bit faster because of time. So just add a couple of stickies with some descriptions. Just nominate someone to be your scribe and talk through what their situation might be. Okay, a little more details. Does that make sense, everyone? Okay, we'll give you just a couple minutes to do that. And we'll try to get this... Oh, it turned on again, so that's good. Okay, we've got our visual back up. So we're fleshing out the person here and their details. While you're thinking about that, this next section here, step number two, is what do they need to do? So it's an extension of those details. Think about the decisions they need to make. Think about how we'll know if they're successful. So how would it be different for this family to go on vacation? What success criteria would they have versus the success criteria of a business traveler or a booking agent? So think about your person and how we would be able to measure success for that persona, for that customer. If it helps, think about how they would be booking the ticket differently from someone else. Okay, so right now you're filling out that top part. Okay, so we're making some guesses on this family based on what we know. Does anyone need more time for the top section of their map? Raise your hand if you need a few more minutes. Okay, all right. Let's wrap up that top section of our map. If we were doing this for real, I wouldn't be rushing you through it. So I'm not trying to hurry you. This is important to have these conversations. For the purposes of our exercise, we probably have enough that we can understand our customer a bit. All right. So as long as you have a couple descriptors up there, that will help inform us for the rest of our map. Okay? Now you want to look at, we're going to move on to the third step, which is this triangle, obviously from what their eyeballs are. So what do they see? Now this I want you to actually do silently because I don't want you to get anchored by each other. What about your person? And in their day-to-day life, what do they see when they look at other airlines, perhaps, to book tickets? What do they see in their immediate environment? What are they watching, reading? What types of magazines might they be interested in or social media? Like, what are the things that when they look around, related to purchasing tickets that they're seeing? A booking agent. What types of industry influences might they have as a booking agent? The family might be looking at what their neighbors are doing for vacation. They might be influenced by that, what they see. Okay? So just focused on seeing, think about things that are observable. Yes, purchase airline tickets. Yeah, think about slightly before. So it's not as they're sitting at their computer about to book the tickets. It's more about their environment and the world as they see it. So it's what they see their neighbors doing, what they see on social, related to tickets, related to... Not necessarily. No, not deciding whether they're going to go to that island or this island, but just the fact that they can see that other people, maybe they see that their neighbor got a free upgrade for their ticket. And so they're... Yeah, just be creative about the types of things they see. But it has to be observable. So this isn't like they're angry about that or they're excited. This is their neighbor got a free upgrade the last time they flew. Not about the location that they need to go per se. Unless it's a situation that... Let's say they're choosing and they want to... They have to decide between 12 different places and that's causing them confusion. That might be an influence, but in most cases, the where doesn't matter. Think about how we want to sell our airline. Why would they come to our airline to come purchase tickets? Yeah, that's the safe bet. Yeah, just assume that they already know where they're going. So this should be the silent part of the exercise. We're going to silently just write down one or two per person and then we're going to share them out and add them to the map. Okay? I know it's hard. Silently write down one or two ideas and then we're going to add it to the map. Yeah, doing things silently is very awkward at first. But once you get used to it, it's a little bit easier. Yes. If you've had a chance to come up with a couple, go ahead and share out in your group. And the goal isn't to debate whether these are right or wrong. It's to create a collective image of what this person might see. If there's duplicates, go ahead and get rid of them. Give you another minute to share those out. So you should be filling out that section with your post-its as you share them. Go ahead and add them to the board. It's a little easier when you can hang these up in a group, but we're doing the best we can here with the tables. So as long as everyone can see it. All right, we are going to pause where you are. As I said, if we were doing this in real life, we would be spending a lot more time on each of these sections to make sure we really understood what our persona would be seeing. I want you to just get a flavor of each of the sections. The types of things that we would be asking and looking for as we're filling out this map. Okay. Silence really is a hard thing here, isn't it? Okay. So the next corner, what do you guess that this section is going to be? What they say. Exactly. So in this section, we want to think about what we can imagine them saying. Maybe what we've actually heard them saying. So most of us know a family that's gone on vacation. I'm going to keep picking on you, because that's an easy example to talk about. We've either been that person or we know one of those people. We've heard them say things. So I would actually list quotes. So what are literal things that they might say or that you've heard them say? So it might be, I'm not ready to go on vacation or I'm dreading booking those tickets because it's always been hard in the past. So what types of things would they say? Write down silently one or two on your own and then we'll share them out and fill in that section. Yes, someone just made the comment about all the things being negative. And that's okay. If this persona has some issues or challenges, let's talk about them and document them. So it doesn't have to all be rosy or negative. It's whatever their reality is. So go ahead and start sharing out if you haven't already and filling out that section with your post-its. Start filling in that part of the map. It looks like we've got most of those sections filled out. If you have a few more, go ahead and just place them there in that quadrant, that triangle. Yes, we're working clockwise around our empathy map. So this next section down here, while they don't have a body, this represents the actions that they do. So what does this persona do? Currently, as someone said, as is in their current state, what can we observe them doing? What actual behavior have we seen? And if we haven't seen anything, what can we imagine this person doing? Again, related to purchasing airline tickets. But think about actions they might be doing. Behavior that we could observe. And it could be just simple little things. Think small enough that would fit on a post-it. Whether it's comparison shopping for prices. Whether it's signing up for sky miles. That helps us kind of see what is important to this person based on what they do. So take a minute or two to write down a couple of items silently and then we'll share out. Okay, go ahead and start sharing if you haven't already. Start filling in the bottom section. Sometimes when we're doing one of these maps, what we discover is we don't know. And so it can highlight areas where we need to do more research. And this one in particular sometimes if we don't know the customer, how do we know what their behavior is? We can do some research. We can acknowledge that we don't know and uncover. Spend a little time on that area. So it's okay if we don't know. Anyone need more time on what they do? You guys are getting really good at this. Okay. So the next one, if you can imagine, is what do they hear? So this is about their social groups. What are they hearing from people at work? What do they... What are they hearing social media? So anything that they might be hearing regarding purchasing these tickets for whatever their situation might be. Same concept. Jot down a couple of ideas silently and then we will share them out. Okay. As long as everyone has at least one, go ahead and start sharing out. The idea is to help us think about it from a different angle. Because maybe when you were doing C, you were kind of in one frame of mind and suddenly thinking about it like horrible noise, you think of something else. It's just to try to trigger different ideas. There could definitely be overlap between them. That's an interesting observation. Yeah. Okay. So I've never skipped a section. It could sometimes for someone it triggers a different response. You could even, if you find that happening, we could have been stricter to say seeing is only things that maybe they maybe hearing is only things they hear from their neighbors or they talk to their mother and their mother tells them something. You're not going to read that. You're not going to see it. So we could have been a little stricter. Maybe on those are only things that you see. Those are only things you hear. But that's an interesting observation. For most people, it helps them think about things a little bit differently. But it's okay. You still have a few things down there. It takes five minutes. It doesn't take that long. Okay. Hopefully you filled out that left-hand section. Which of these areas was the most difficult for you? Share. The first two I'm hearing? Okay. Is that just because they were the first two? Thinking in this way is a little bit differently. Okay. So he said they got into the rhythm and it was quite easier after that. Yes. This is more of a feeling. So we've got a lot of points here. But I think this is the hardest because we're sort of this is very second hand very removed. So we're trying to figure out what so we can figure out what they see because that's our platform. We can figure out what they do. We can sort of see what they're doing. But what is influencing them is I think very hard to judge. And I'm not sure how I'd even do that if this was an actual thing I'd be. Okay. Appreciate that. Someone else mentioned that for them when they got to hear it was hard for them to separate that from the seeing and the saying because that was kind of similar. So we discussed a little bit that we could be much stricter about this. So with the seeing maybe we could say so if I say social media it's literally things in print and when we talk about hearing it is only things they hear. So it's a phone call with their mother. It is a conference call at work because they can't see anything. They can't hear what they're hearing. We could have been stricter with each of the categories because the idea is that these are triggering us to look at something from a different angle. So you are walking around kind of the customer from these different perspectives. This might be easier if you know the situation. For example, you have all the book tickets in the past. So you can think about that and then jot down the points. But in products like which are B2B which are sold to businesses not to consumers. That it might be difficult for us to think about what a business or a corporate might want for a product versus consumers. So can I say anything? Okay, so that's an interesting concept in terms of the difference between your customer being a person versus a company. What I would mention there is that even if you're selling for a business there is somebody that you need to convince that they're going to use this and a business doesn't necessarily use your software. The people in that business use your software. So I would still if you were it was a corporate sort of software I would still hone in on what employee, what type of employee what is their role within that company that they would be using your software. So I will be around later to take additional questions. I just want to make sure we wrap up on time. So up till now we've been capturing things that were observable. Things that we could actually confirm that someone sees or hears or says. This next section it's basically inside their head. Here's where we get to guess a little bit. We've spent some time thinking about this person and their environment. Now we want to capture what we think their pains and gains might be. So pains are their fears, frustrations, things they're worried about and the gains are things that they want. Things they hope for. Things they're striving for. And if you have any other thoughts that come to mind anything that might motivate their behavior. Think about what their, what would trigger them to actually take a step toward using our software or while they're using our software what would help them in some way or motivate their behavior one way or another. So this can be, look at both sides of it. Their fears and their hopes and dreams. So as you're writing these on stickies make a little word of P for pain, you know, write the letter so you can keep track of which ones are the pains and which ones are the gains. So it might be, a gain might be something like I want to spend as little time as possible booking this ticket. Like if you're a travel agent you don't want to spend an hour having to book a ticket for a client. You want it to be simple and easy and painless. Whereas maybe a family traveler might want to not make a mistake. You know, if my mom were trying to book a ticket she would be so afraid of entering in the wrong information of getting stopped at the airport somehow because she did something wrong. That would be her anxiety, her pain for her. So think about your persona, jot down a couple of pains and gains. Here's where we get to kind of interpret and do some analysis of what we know about this person. I'll give you a couple extra minutes for this because it takes a little longer to think through what our customer might want. Looks like sharing happening our heads are getting filled up with pains and gains. Alright. Give you another minute to finish that up. And then I'm going to ask for a volunteer to give us a little overview of their map. Okay. Does anyone need more time? Okay. I'll give you another 30 seconds or so to get the last of your post-its in his head or her head. Okay. Who wants to volunteer to give us a summary of their map? Basically tell us who your person is and read a post-it or two from each of the sections so we kind of get a picture of that person. Oh, we've got a volunteer back here. Let me get you the mic. Just start at the top and then we'll work our way around. Just give us an example from each of the categories. Hi. So my persona is an armed forces personnel who is expected to report to the posting place as soon as possible as there has been an emergency declared and he's expected to be there as soon as possible. So what they need to do is they should get a confirmed ticket at a constitutional rate and confirmed ticket on a constitutional rate so that they can reach out as soon as possible. So what they see is like the airline provides frequent flights so that they can get a very short notice to the destination that they are traveling to and they say that which is the earliest flight to the destination and I can't wait for the queue so he wants to bypass the different formalities because these personnel are generally they have the authentication since they are government employees they might not need to be there and they generally are expected to be aggressive since it's a very short notice and they were on holiday and they are expected to report at their workplace so that obviously becomes a reason for aggression and they are annoyed as well because of that and what they hear is like the airlines getting delayed and cancelled and they hear about the options that their other colleagues have opted for while reaching that same destination and so the gain is that they are looking for is the convenient way to book flights by just their specific details like the Aadhaar card number that we have in here in India also social security number in US and the pain is like it would have been better if they would have received this flight ticket along with their call letter itself. Let's give them a hand for reading that out good job anyone else want to volunteer we have time for probably one more over here so just a quick summary kind of one from each category yes our passenger was a special person person with these special needs so we had we tried to understood his situation he is going to have some medical situation and need to travel from say from Jharkhand to Bangalore so in the mind he have many things like safety and the assistance he will get at the airport and whether he will be able to reach timely there and the success criteria for the passenger like airline was my passenger smoothly and comfortably reaches his destination it was the success criteria for them and but he saw many things like some negative experience about the airline some of the neighbors grandma was ill handled during the whole transition so this was one of his worry and like and they were able to see some special section or quota for the special people in this booking and the travel and they say like airlines promise many things in the promotion schemes but the real picture is different so they find it different things at the time and they also take in consideration the negative expressions experience of the someone about these duty transitions and they take two decisions first they choose some agent who already have a very good experience and the very good reviews and reputation about these kind of cases so they book the ticket using those agents and second is they totally drop the idea by going through the player and they choose some other mode of transportation and once we assume like after taking action they already booked the ticket and what they are hearing like three kind of responses can be there like somebody can appraise them it was a good decision they booked the ticket through this agent and they will be in the safe hands and second can be the mixed response like he will be little worried okay whether it was good or not and last one can be experienced they can hear the same from them again you had made a mistake by booking in this airline pain was like as a traveler I will think the person with the special need what if nobody I will worry like in the pain what if nobody is there to take care in case of any emergency there with me and will I reach safely without any kind of issues with this airline gain and wish I will say I will wish a special treatment from booking ticket till I get out of the airport after landing and after land there is one dedicated representative or some help is there who can collect my luggage and escort me to the taxi service or to any person who is there to receive me thank you very much let's give them a hand too okay so we're finished with our map I want to emphasize this again that while we can guess as to what people are thinking and doing and what their behavior might be we still need to go out and talk to people and confirm what some of these assumptions are here on our map now let's think for a minute about when we would do an empathy map I can see it on my screen it's just a question so when would we build an empathy map when you want to understand your person okay in terms of your process what seems like a time that you would use this technique when something's not working okay so we could identify a situation where we notice problems maybe with our software we could then dig into maybe a little bit more what about at the start of a project when we're just trying to understand our customer and understand our project there's no more visuals left really they're just questions so so project inception is a big time a lot of times when we're shifting from maybe we're doing a bunch of user stories about a booking agent and then we're about to do a slice for our family traveler so slicing our stories if you use like story mapping I've actually sliced maps based on our persona because some of the functionality is going to be the same we still need to book a ticket at the end of the day but how we approach it might be different based on our customers so if we're shifting gears from one to another that might be a natural time that we're going to shift okay any questions on this technique comments in the initial slides we discussed on paradigm of how useful a software could be or what's the definition of usefulness so you know this as a few people you know brought up that I never use wallet or I never use FaceTime you know but that again depends you know it has this demographic variable isn't it I mean FaceTime is not used in India much but it might be useful in America so I mean that could be related isn't it absolutely the software we're building if we're building it for this customer we can validate that that customer will use it now sometimes what happens is we build it for this customer and some other customer you didn't think was going to use it ends up being the main user but that ends up being unpredictable and not something we can plan for we definitely want to be thinking about the market that we're going in which we didn't get into specific here as I labeled the slide you know it's a lightweight persona we just very loosely came up with some people this could actually feed into a persona if you were going to be actually doing a more robust persona this gives us a starting place for things that we should be considering as we build that out other questions or comments I think one of the slide said said you know we need to talk to the people I think just talking to people or your persona doesn't help you is what I think I think we should be with the persona observing him otherwise you don't know you know what he's feeling for example if you go and talk to your persona you might tell something but it doesn't mean that and it's not that easy to figure out yeah I completely agree yeah so so I think generically broadly I'm saying talk to customers that very well includes observing them doing surveys getting out in the field and watching people how they might actually do a thing so it's not just about asking them direct questions because you're absolutely right you're going to get an answer that might be close to what they're really thinking but not necessarily so all of those components of user design are going to be important just a continuation of that so it's very important to design the right survey because you don't want a lot of generic response which is difficult to reconcile so is there any method or what would you recommend to reach out to customers especially in the global market and how do you design that specific survey which gives you the outcome you're looking for email me afterwards and that's a whole another like all day workshop about designing surveys designing different research that we can do to find out more about our customers I don't have a simple answer for you what's going on here but alright we've got about 10 minutes left I think grab a post-it if you would grab a couple if you want to and I want you to answer a couple of questions for me the first is what were a couple of ideas that were confirmed for you today something that was validated you came in and you knew this thing and then we had this session and you were like yep that is still true I was right I knew this thing and it is correct the other thing I want you to think about jot down on stickies what new ideas what new concepts some thought that came into your mind some different thing that you're going to leave here knowing that you didn't know before so if you can take 2-3 minutes to jot both of those questions down something that was validated and new ideas just one per stickie I'm going to end up collecting those one were done with this so try to write neatly so I can read your handwriting so we're jotting down a validation and any new ideas they don't have to be big ideas big thoughts but just something that occurred to you I might use the phrase an aha moment where something just clicked and made sense to you okay let's hear a couple of the validations first what was something you knew coming in here and was validated for you yes I think it was knowing your user like who will be using the application and basically what we did in like empathy mapping is something about the user in different scenarios we should empathize with our customers in each and every field or the part of the process whether it is the start or the end of the project and we should always try to keep ourselves in their shoes to better understand the situation I'm sure that's a big reason why all of you are here is because you care about your customers you wouldn't be here if you didn't care about them so I would say this is a kind of understanding others and it could be applicable in various fields not just understanding the user so like you work in teams people how a team can be thinking or something problem or something that could also be a good way thanks for sharing okay let's switch gears into new ideas what were some new things you learned today so I think there are different aspects to understanding a user as you explained what they hear what they say, what they feel and also more important to keep revisiting your user persona during the course of your journey I like the concept of bullseye I think this is a very good and engaging technique for prioritization I am a product owner and we do this a lot I think I'm gonna use it going forward because it's very visual and very engaging and it'll help keep that bullseye because once we work through something for that first persona we can use it to inform what the next priority would be that's why we have those concentric circles other new ideas so I hadn't thought through in terms of a perspective of think, see, say second hand information so that was new to me and the empathy map in itself of bucketing things this way wasn't something that I thought through thank you, so bucketing things in different ways for me the aha moment was silent brainstorming so frankly when you participate in so many prioritization sessions it's all about chaos and whosoever voice is loudest usually wins so silent brainstorming was a very good aha moment for me I'm glad you mentioned that one of the big reasons I use it I mentioned anchoring ideas the key thing is so that we hear from everybody because no matter how kind of loud or talkative you think everyone is somebody wins when everyone's talking there's one voice that kind of gets heard and we want to kind of equal that playing field so that everyone has a chance to speak another new idea the first exercise we did that was woven together with the listening if we are listening to a person or are we the person who keeps on talking so on the table the person who spoke the last was the person's chat the chat was in line with his or her thought process so I just connected those two dots to say so that was an aha moment for me thanks for sharing that observation the more aware we are of these sort of things we're doing are we listening, are we not we can then try to create some situations where we're balancing that out we'll take one more I think in this whole exercise the experiences and ideas were in plenty so when we were doing that brainstorming on what is important when I was thinking from a perspective I could see and hear different perspectives so I think that's a very good tool to use thank you alright how much time do we have left I lost my clock on my three minutes we might have time for one question you know you had one so let's wrap up with this one question so my question was does this entire exercise does this feed into the requirements gathering process is there a connection between the two so who are the participants it's kind of a secondary question and does this feed into our requirements gathering so I generally would do this I don't want to say well before requirements gathering it certainly feeds into it but project inception kind of deciding which project should we even do which customer should we be focusing on so once we figure that out we'll go deeper for that particular customer which will then in turn feed into the requirements that we're gathering because the requirements for your booking agent are going to be really different than the requirements for this family traveling potentially there's going to be overlap in all of them but mapping things out thinking about a person I generally if you're aware of story mapping as a technique I won't build a story map until I know what a person is and so this has to naturally come before that so that I know which customer we're actually talking about when we build that story map now we can reuse the map for the next person if we're kind of adding to it and fleshing out maybe some more requirements for a different person so all of this flows as we're getting more and more granular the term progressive elaboration this is kind of high level forward delivering the software we can confirm some of our assumptions that we've made on our maps which will then feed into our requirements and that feedback will feed into the additional story cards that we might be working on and delivering so that's a really great question to end on so thank you all for your engagement and participation today thank you