Thanks to what I learned in my user research, writing a problem statement is pretty easy:
It is hard for comedy fans to discover comedians or find gigs to go to.
I also included 3 problem statements directly from my two personas:
Casual Fan – Problem Statement
Comedy Enthusiast – Problem Statement
Comedy Enthusiast – Problem Statement 2
It’s pretty clear that there is a problem to be solved but writing a brief is not so simple!
I have lots of ideas for how to solve this problem but, of course, they’re all jumbled and excited in my head. I ended up structuring my brief into a list of requirements, and a list of suggestions of how these requirements might be met (in kind of technical, but not detailed terms)
I knew I’d need to define an MVP and this was confirmed by Austin (the TA) when he commented on my work.
I did a bunch of sketching, trying to work out some ideas and get some creativity flowing and I came up with this diagram:
Some kind of functions chart
Basically I put down the four main things the site will show users. These are in rectangles:
- Comedians you do like
- [Suggestions of] comedians you would like
- [Suggestions of] gigs you would like
- Reviews
Then I wrote down all the things that would inform these four things, like:
“Rate Acts – yes/no” would feed into and out of the “Comedians you do like” list.
“About, Style, Tags, Bio” would be a kind of outputs of the “Comedians you would like” list.
“Generally recommended” acts would feed into the “Comedians you would like” list.
Also “Similar acts to acts you like” would feed into the “Comedians you would like” list.
Then I had a brainwave… I circled the things that would be vital for the service in orange. This describes a system where essentially, users can list comedians they like (by clicking yes or no to suggested acts). Suggested acts are just ones that come generally recommended.
I labelled orange “MVP”. Then, in red, I circled “Similar acts to acts you like” as this would be the very next stage, where acts suggested to the user would be based upon their own likes.
The next stage, circled in green, would be to start listing and suggesting gigs. The fourth stage, in blue, is to include extra features like curated reviews of gigs, special offers to users, and letting users to “follow” knowledgeable user’s recommendations.
This helped me break things down and get a basic idea of where I need to start, phew. I could probably also have thrown these functions onto a kano chart, or thought about the MoSCoW model. Also helpful will be creating some user stories and I’ll be doing this soon!
