Understanding Your Aim

Product design + strategy at .eco

Before we get started, a side note for anyone doing this type of work.

Uncertainty is a always an interesting place to arrive at, professionally. I tend to believe in a perspective that you could simply state as “believing in yourself”. Lame eh? I know, but I’m serious. Having enough faith in your craft to lovingly embrace uncertainty and wrangle it into meaningful direction has almost become a sport. By cranking through failure(s) and reflecting on the good, bad and ugly that came from each one I’ve arrived at a fairly certain opinion. Simply stated, when you come into a fresh problem space, uninformed, you LISTEN. Don’t rush to be busy. That time will come.

If you thoughtfully seek to understand the problem space you not only have (hopefully) arrived at a well-informed point of view on the problem that needs to be solved. There’s also a good chance that you’ve learned a bunch about the culture and earned some trust along the way. Don’t underestimate these points. You will sink the project and yourself if you don’t listen to what people are telling you. When you structure your approach around listening, signals or hints start to show themselves and lead you to asking better questions, therefore suggesting more relevant product research, strategy and design directions.

Workshops Are Always Good For Shaking the Tree.

Having spent a few weeks steeping in the vision communicated for .eco via interviews and an in eternal survey the missing piece was to get all the smart people in one room and squeeze their brains for all the juicy, relevant insight possible. I felt that I knew enough about the problem space at this point to put a successful workshop together. Now I needed to frame up the core focus of the workshop and start roughing in the format and flow.

Pro tip: Don’t run a workshop unless you have clear goals! In fact, don’t bother asking people to collaborate if you yourself don’t understand your own goals. Socialize your goals and workshop format with key stakeholders in advance of the workshop. They will have valuable input. Guaranteed.

Goals For the Workshop.

1. Get clear stakeholder alignment on the mission for .eco
2. Teach product team a simple, pragmatic and valuable method for creating a meaningful and informed product roadmap.
3. With a good grasp on history and intentions of internal stakeholders, this was the next piece of information that I felt necessary in order to proceed forward with external research.
4. Capture as much tacit knowledge as possible that lingered within the group regarding Community attributes
5. Surface as many relevant assumptions and biases within the group via the structure of the exercises.

The Design Challenge at Dot ECO

As a new TLD (Top Level Domain) categorized as a “Community TLD” there is a set of guidelines as to how .eco domain owners are supposed to use their web properties attached to the domain. That includes both the website they host and the .eco System Profile that comes with every domain registration. It’s simple, you buy a .eco domain and you activate a public facing profile for each domain and pledge to “to support positive change for the planet and to be honest when sharing information on environmental actions.”

Core Questions Rattling Around My Brain

What defines “community”, for better or worse?

What is .eco’s role in the story?

Who are the users?

What features do we really need to launch with that lead to a meaningful experience and what does the roadmap look like?

How do features map to those use cases and actors?

What comes first?

The Workshop structure

I basically just gave the workshop signposts away in the above questions. There is great tension in the dynamic generated between understanding what elements of community are relevant to the .eco product strategy, what user stories play key roles in the success of the approach, what role .eco plays in the solution and what features support the desired outcomes that support a community driven product.

As with most workshops it’s always good form to take a few steps back and walk through a brief history of the reason why we’ve all jammed ourselves into this cozy space for the day. It honours the past efforts of the team and help everyone know “where the bodies are buried”.

Here’s the setup:

// What we’re aiming to accomplish. Workshop format and guidelines for engagement.

// Historical relevance and vision statement/direction, pillars. Principles.

// Exercise 01 //

Exploring Community Dynamics / 10 min

On the yellow sticky notes, in as few words possible, answer these questions as a starter or just openly note what comes to mind about “community” when you think about it.

• What makes a community resilient?
• Why do some fail?
• When do they succeed?
• What does community mean to you?
• What defines community?
• What are we not asking?

Clustering / 20 min

// Exercise 2 //

Actors. Users. Customers. Etc. Who are they for .eco? / 10 min

On the orange sticky notes, write down who the actors / users / players / participants might be considered in the long term goals outlined earlier?

What is .eco’s role in the community? / 5 min

On the magenta sticky notes, write down how you think .eco should or shouldn’t directly engage with the community.

MadLib Clusters / 20 min

Combine one of each: an actor, .eco’s role, a theme from community and discuss what feature would support that relationship. They don’t have to be 100% real. It’s actually more effective at times to depart from the obvious and use the format to see how you can create Bizarro World scenarios that lead to negative user experiences, which in turn can illuminate design constraints you hadn’t yet considered. The point is to think about the dynamics that they create as a grouping.

(I’ll forever thank Dan Saffer for dropping ‘Bizarro World’ on us during his workshop at IxD’08.)

// Exercise 3 //

Mapping the Story

Organize the clusters on the timeline to see implications on prioritization and strategy.

What Did We Learn?

• This is going to be tough.
• The process shed light on the complexity of the problems that we could solve, might solve, should solve, will solve.
• Overall the feedback on the workshop was extremely positive. The group particularly enjoyed the point where we clustered Themes, Roles & Features together.
• We need to honour the spectrum of interest and keep the “Environmentalist” tone in check
• Diversity is key.
• We increase the odds of affecting the global conversation when we bring in as many people as possible that are on the spectrum of thinking about and acting for the environment. Don’t design this only for urbanite, eco-friendly, core environmentalists.
• We must embrace welcoming language and design patterns. We must be very thoughtful about tone, complexity of interactions and keeping focused on relevance. Noise is already very present in the environmental community. The last thing we want to do is add to it.
• Focus on transparency. This is at the core of the organization. It needs to be at the core of the product.

Overall…

Overall, the workshop couldn’t have gone better. I scheduled it for 3hrs and the discussions stimulated by the exercises carried us well into lunch and then progressed through the rest of the day. Some might consider that a failure but letting the workshop take it’s natural course led to a insightful output and a very positive experience for the team.

The group generated a ton of viable output from the workshop, which I will be synthesizing in the coming weeks. Perhaps I’ll offer up Part 2 of this recap that contains the synthesis? We’ll see!