Finding potential user groups and industry verticals
Occipital is a spatial computing company based out of San Francisco, CA. They pioneered the first 3D sensor for mobile devices, the Structure sensor, to bring 3D scanning, large-scale reconstruction and augemented reality capabilities to phones and tablets.
Which potential user group would garner the most value from using the structure sensor and Occipital's platform? My team (Sarah Anne Hudson, Sylvia Kim and Oriane Daley - these will all open in a new tab) sought to unlock the answer to this question through rigorous and thorough research that engendered empathy for the company's stakeholders.
The plan of attack was to catalog potential touch points across the platform and identify potential user's pain points. Our research had given us a broad view of industries that may benefit from 3D technology. However, my team recognized that this was a distant and impersonal view without feedback from real users and stakeholders.
Staring at a computer screen only gets you so far - I couldn't proceed until I talked to people about the solutions they needed.
My team interviewed doctors, medical students, several developers, a biomedical engineer, a scenic carpenter, a construction foreman and an assistant director. We even went to bridal boutiques and spoke with dressmakers.
Now, armed with insight into the day-to-day lives of potential users, my team began to assemble user's need-states and map them to Occipital's value proposition.
I miscalculated my next steps. Since my team and I had been ideating and diverging for almost two weeks, I thought the next step should be to converge. It turns out, what you think your next steps should be and what your next steps actually need to be aren't always congruent.
We had a breakthrough when we recognized the need to diverge further and to trust the process.
After mind-mapping potential use cases from the most promising industries, my team identified patterns in both user need-states as well as the most prominent hooks to Occipital's platform.
We noticed that people in certain industries were taking thousands of photographs in attempts to understand spatial relationships.
When my team finally converged, we had an ideal candidate in mind for Occipital's product, a key set of features that candidate would be interested in, and an action plan to both engage that group and illicit feedback from them at regular intervals
Our final recommendation was that Occipital focus on the film industry and position their product as a communication tool.
One person we interviewed said they had taken over ten thousand photographs while tracking the extras during the filming of their last movie. If, with their new sensor, they only have to take, say, three thousand photos, you could infer the 3D scanning technology "soaked up" seven thousand images.
This vertical involves multidisciplinary groups that collaborate toward a common goal over an extended period of time. This is in contrast to other verticals, such as the wedding industry, in which separate contenders collaborate during a short time line, yet compete financially for funding out of the same budget.
The film industry possessed attractive features:
Research includes acknowledging when something is not a good idea.
For example, the team discovered a potential use case for shoppers to scan their feet and use the generated model to purchase the perfect pair of shoes.
Let's think about this. People use the product just once, get their perfect pair of shoes, then probably don't need the product ever again?
Other examples are industries such as healthcare that represent a higher level of risk to adopt new technology due to regulatory and security concerns surrounding storing and transmitting patient data.
I discovered that managing my assumptions is a key component of interviewing.
Also, during user interviews, don't ask about technological features - ask about human behavior.
I also found that I can't wait until the last second to check if I am on the right Wi-Fi to connect to Apple TV!
It's almost guaranteed I'll be on the wrong one, even if I've deleted the other networks a dozen times.