Using data design to understand your customers (Part 1)
Tags: Work, Business, Data Design, Data Science, Customer Experience

An alternative approach to creating and understanding customers through insight-driven archetypes

We are at the dawn of a revolution, predicted to impact every aspect of our experience of the world. The networks and connected devices fueling this new era are already producing over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day.

In business, we’ve been told for many years that data = opportunity to create value. We agree with this statement in the same way crude oil or steam represented a massive opportunity leading up to the 1st industrial revolution. As with any new resource or technology, the value lies in the mastery and the focus of the application of it. We see data as a great tool to make better decisions up and down the organisation.

Technology and the data exhaust it creates is becoming more deeply integrated into the fabric of our lives (and bodies) than ever before, making it more complex to understand, decipher and use. Vast amounts of data and rapid technological innovation have changed the landscape of how we design new experiences and products. Alongside the accelerated growth of data and technology, there is a growing demand for C-level executives to magically create a ‘winning’ solution, and deliver innovation within shorter iteration cycles, while staying ahead of changing customer expectations. We have had this in front of mind for a while and have already been exploring this area.

At Method, we believe the best innovators are the ones that take a people (and planet) centric approach to navigate the complexity of new data sets and technologies; finding true insights which can be used to develop better products, services and business models. With the abundance of user-generated data, there is a unique opportunity to accelerate and improve the design process by merging design thinking and product development processes with user-data to produce a more engaging, holistic experience for the customers.

So, how can we effectively incorporate a people-centric approach into an era of abundant data?

What are data-driven Archetypes? Why do you need them?

If you are aspiring to maximize lifetime customer value, a strong user-centric capability is needed to develop meaningful and sustained relationships with users. Customer-centric design helps build products and services that are more likely to resonate with users and fit into their context. Often a valuable tool and outcome of the early design process are user archetypes — a set of abstract characters that represent the needs and context of the current/potential users of a product or service. These archetypes are used to aid decision-making when designing a new product or service experience. Archetype’s help teams to build products or services that are relevant to the context, needs and goals of the person using them.

The traditional approach of creating archetypes involves conducting in-depth interviews, surveys and focus groups to map common behaviours and needs. However, often this is a laborious approach which runs the danger of delivering archetypes that are too narrow or too broad. Additionally, the constraints of this method are dictated by limited project time to conduct user research and/or budgetary constraints.

Luckily, an abundance of data brings unique opportunities to supercharge the human-centric design approach and achieve real-time visibility of the target audience. Fast and scalable insights can be generated by supplementing the traditional approach with collecting users’ digital footprints. Moreover, those insights can be automatically tuned to reflect changing or emerging behaviours, as well as identifying and alleviating friction points. Interestingly, this approach is more inclusive of all the users, since it does not report only demographic averages of the target audience as the traditional personas do, but allows us to focus on the individual to the highest possible degree, identifying the more relevant archetypes as well as those on the periphery. In addition, real-time access to data-driven archetypes can inform a business’s strategic decision making, commercial tactics and even pricing models.

Our designers at Method use this skill as a tool in conjunction with qualitative strategic thinking around emerging user behaviours that could be matched to potential products, services or brand experiences. This enables us to augment the human-centric approach, find new inspirations and design services that better resonate with the audience. And for our clients, data-driven archetypes offer unique opportunities to get to know their current and potential users at a larger scale, track what their users are talking about, how they research new products online and what their behavioural drivers are.

In part two of this article, we will share a real-life case of how we have created data-driven archetypes by combining their digital footprint and the latest data science techniques complemented by a qualitative methodology to identify behavioural patterns.