Event #1: Validating Product Ideas from 0 to 1

I attended a webinar titled Validating Product Ideas from 0 to 1. It is conducted by Daylon Soh, the Founder and General Manager of CuriousCore. The webinar mainly covered validating product ideas using the validation canvas to run potential experiments in order to verify our hypotheses. It also covered the concept of competitive vulnerability to better help us ideate, validate and overcome issues UX designers may face while undergoing the design process.

Firstly, the speaker spoke about the Product Market Fit of a product design. In reality, every product would need to be able to gain traction and get to the mass market in order to gain profits. The product would need to be able to compete with all other products that solve the customers’ problems.

In order to achieve that, as designers, we need to be able to pitch our ideas to the relevant stakeholders to obtain buy-in. This can be done by evaluating factors such as business model, adoption strategy, other products in the market, competitive advantages and user testimonials.

The speaker also mentioned the success story of Airbnb. The co-founders of Airbnb are from design schools. In order to obtain buy-in for their idea, they create an initial pitch deck to demonstrate the proof of concept and to show that their idea has potential. This made me realise that even though we are designers, we also need the ability to be able to communicate and pitch our ideas to the stakeholders in order for our product design to be successfully implemented. Just like in our group project, we needed to prepare a pitch document for submission and we had to evaluate, and justify our design as well as possible costings for the work involved. We also had to record a presentation of our pitch for our final project submission as well. I now understand that having a job as a designer does not only encompasses designing. As a designer, we should also be able to pitch our design, justify the resources needed for our design and be able to create a design that fits our target audience and market by understanding the product market fit. Hence, I am very glad that NM4259 allowed me to experiment and try to do all of these such as ideating, designing and pitching!

Another concept that the speaker went through was the validation of product ideas. As designers, we should not be going to customers to ask them what they want. But rather, we should ask the customers what are their problems and from there, understand what we are trying to solve and test out our solutions. The speaker then brought in this template called Validation Canvas which we can use to validate our ideas and evaluate whether our ideas are a good fit.

I found one of the concepts inside Validation Canvas very interesting and related to what we learned in class. We learned in NM4259 class that in the design thinking process, there will be iterations. This is similar to Pivots in the Validation Canvas in which when we learn new things, we will go to a new pivot and it is centering around testing, learning and repeating. Every time we iterate and test that particular iteration, we will validate and evaluate it via factors such as success criteria and learning points. Thereafter, we will pivot from there, take whatever we learned and make the next iteration.

The speaker also mentioned that when we start to solve a problem, we tend to have our own set of assumptions. However, we are not building a product for ourselves. Instead, we are building the product for other people and hence we need to test our assumptions and use various methods to get users to tell us their real pain points. This links to the story of Carousell mentioned by the speaker. Every week, the founders went down to flea market sites to talk to sellers and buyers in order to take their feedback weekly. They then made adjustments to their prototypes and even had alpha and beta versions before launching and before they found product market fit.

This made me think of NM4259 where we learned about user research methods and iterations in the design process as well as understanding the importance of getting feedback from users. It is not enough to understand users’ issues or needs, as designers, we should also validate our ideas with users via methods such as iterating and prototyping. If not, we may be stuck in a loop of producing products that nobody use. In the group project, my group has done that in which we validated our idea with the users via contextual inquiry and iterated as necessary.

This also made me realise and bring in the concept of localisation and culture. I realised that where the users are from also affects how the product should be designed. Depending on the target audience, a design can be done with localised content in mind or designed in a manner where it is international enough such that it is used globally. As designers, we should definitely take this into account as well.