Discovering Users for Technical Innovations through Systematic Matchmaking
Bart van Dijk, John L Zimmerman · 2019
Every year Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers create new technical innovations. Unfortunately, the User-Centered Design (UCD) processes used by most designers in HCI does not help much when the challenge is to find the best users for these innovations. We augmented the matchmaking design method, making it more systematic in considering potential users by using a list of 399 occupation groups and by incorporating the customer discovery interviews from the Lean Startup. We then assessed our new design method by searching for users who might benefit from two different technical innovations: ViBand and PaperID. We found that matchmaking with the list of occupation groups helped surface users we would likely have not considered. In addition, the customer discovery interviews helped to generate better applications and additional target users for the innovations. This paper documents our process, the design method, and insights we gained from using it.