Assignment: Learning Launch

Challenge & Selection    The tool that my team and I used for our project was Learning Launch. Launching the new  software/mobile application requires good understanding of the targeted group and of the  customers in general. Your idea could be good, but it can fail in the process you represent it to  your customers.  We decided to use this tool, because even if we do the whole market research, even if we collect  all the statistics and data, we can never be sure that this data is applicable in our case as well.  As the professor Hans Richter mentioned in the video, you cannot know the data if something does  still not exist and is still not out there. You can guess it, but why we should not try it at this  point. That’s why we selected this tool. We decided launch the demo and give the application  to one sample of people, to let them use the application so we could observe how people are  interacting with it.     In that way we can learn from each other, listen to our customers asking them questions and  identifying what is good and what can be improved. We think that try-fail-retry approach is the  best way to bring one mobile application to market.         Application    We started by giving the application to random sample of people (university students) and  analysed how they use the application, when, in which occasions. Basically, how they interact  with our product. We included also one small questionnaire inside just to gather more info and  comments.   Then we spoke with the people, we collected feedback so we could analyse it better.  We asked them various questions; from which features they would love to have, and what they  found not useful at all, to representation decision. By that we mean colour decision and menu  organization. Basically, we collected the whole user experience. We were constantly  interacting with our future customers, and we took their feedback very serious. We would  reimplement the app, modified per our customer needs and made a new demo, until we had the  software which was answering the customer needs. Software ready to go public.   I think we can improve this technique, by combining it better with the visualization technique  we saw during lectures, which will I will tell more later about.         Insight & Approach    We learned a lot following this approach. Is hard to gain useful data if you ask your potential  users questions for some product or service, without showing them the product. Everyone who  reads your description or project documentation, would need to imagine this tool and their  feedback would depend of their imagination basically.   Using the demo version and gaining data from your potential customer is a powerful tool. They  can see what you are talking about and this gives your customer the possibility to give you  better feedback. At the end this approach helps also you, so you can directly speak and discuss  the customer needs.

This was acceptable for us, because changing the product as the customer wants was not costing  us a lot, we needed to put more efforts yes, but we did not have high extra costs for  implementing it, and we understand that in some other circumstances we would need to modify  out approach.     Next time, I might combine even more this approach with the visualizations tool we saw during  the lecture, so we can adapt even more the design thinking process. In that case we can conclude  and solve some problems in advance, before even implementing them. That will help us for  sure to make better launching products and reduce numbers of our demos.

