What’s Unique About Your Project

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Design Notebooks

Let’s take some time to review some of your Design Notebooks. When presenting:

  1. Share your project concept
  2. Show your User Personas
  3. Who is your most important user group & why

What’s Unique About Your Project

Let’s take another look at the project canvas.

So far we’ve:

  • Identified a real need (problem) we want to address with our projects
  • Researched other existing alternatives to determine the state of the art
  • Identified our target audiences (customer segments) and analyzed them with User Personas and User Stories
  • Identified our most important user groups (early adopters) and what they need to be able to do with our solutions

Knowing all this; the need we’re addressing, who’s need it is, and how others are addressing it, we can now identify how our treatment will be different (Unique Value Proposition).

Exercise

  • Take a few minutes to review your project canvas so far. Review your problem statement, your existing alternatives, and your most important user groups.
  • Reflect on how you’d like to approach addressing the needs of your most important user groups.
  • How is this different from how your existing alternatives address those needs?
  • Why do you think your approach is better?
  • Write out a few drafts of a Unique Value Proposition for your project. State it as a “Single clear, compelling message that states why your project is different and worth paying attention to”.
  • Update your project canvas with your Unique Value Proposition.

High Level Concept

Your High Level Concept is a shorthand analogy you can use to quickly explain your unique approach. It’s also known as a High Concept Pitch.

You can state it as a comparison to some existing alternative, e.g. “Uber is AirBnB for car services”, or  “Sharknado is Jaws meets Twister”, or “Youtube is Flickr for videos”, etc.

Exercise

  • Break up into groups and take turns presenting your Unique Value Propositions.
  • Brainstorm with your group to come up with a few High Level Concept statements that best describe your project by analogy.
  • Update your project canvas with your favorite High Level Concept

Assignment

Dashboard

  • Continue collecting links for current events relevant to your project, trends & events relevant to your project’s innovation context, and existing alternatives to your project.
  • Pick a few links to share in class next week

Solution

  • Review your project canvas so far
  • Review your problem statement and existing alternatives
  • Review your customer segments, especially your early adopters and their user stories
  • Review your unique value proposition and your high level concept
  • Based on on these steps in your process, outline a solution to your problem
  • Be sure to focus on your most important user group(s) and that you are taking a unique approach to addressing their needs
  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Project Solution”
  • Present your solution outline

Submitting Your Work

This week’s homework assignment is due next week before class. When you’ve completed them, post a comment on this page (Who’s Your Audience), including a link to your Design Notebook.

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