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Product Box

Imagine walking into a shop and seeing your product on the shelf. What would the box look like? The Product Box exercise challenges participants to design a physical package for their hypothetical product. This method taps into the creative side of product development, encouraging teams to think about key features, benefits, and selling points.

How it works:

  1. Provide participants with craft materials (cardboard boxes, markers, stickers, etc.).
  2. Ask them to create a product box that would entice customers to purchase.
  3. Teams present their boxes, explaining the features and benefits highlighted.

This exercise helps identify which aspects of the product resonate most with potential customers and can inform marketing strategies.

Speed Boat

The Speed Boat technique is a visual and engaging way to gather feedback on existing products or services. It uses the metaphor of a boat to represent the product, with anchors symbolising issues that slow progress.

Implementation:

  1. Draw a simple boat on a whiteboard or large paper.
  2. Ask participants to write down ‘anchors’ (problems or obstacles) on sticky notes.
  3. Place these anchors below the boat, with the most significant issues closest to the vessel.
  4. Discuss each anchor and brainstorm solutions to ‘lift’ them.

This method helps prioritise improvements by visualising which issues have the most significant impact on the product’s success.

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a user-centred design technique that helps understand how people categorise information. It’s particularly useful for organising content, features, or navigation structures.

Process:

  1. Create cards with different features, content items, or product categories.
  2. Ask participants to sort these cards into groups that make sense to them.
  3. Observe and analyse the patterns in how people organise the information.

This method provides insights into users’ mental models, helping design more intuitive interfaces and product structures.

Buy a Feature

Buy a Feature is a prioritisation game that simulates a marketplace where participants ‘purchase’ features they value most. It’s an excellent way to understand which features customers are willing to invest in.

How to play:

  1. Create a list of potential features with associated ‘prices’ based on development cost or complexity.
  2. Give participants a limited budget of play money.
  3. Allow them to ‘buy’ the features they find most valuable.
  4. Tally the results to see which features were most popular.

This game provides quantitative data on feature preferences and can reveal surprising insights about what customers truly value.