Strategic vision - Value Proposition Canvas Overview

Recently, I have been introduced to the Double Diamond Design Process and was quite eager to apply it to a UX project. Before knowing this framework, I roughly understand parts of the procedures including preliminary research on the market and the potential users, coming with the wireframes, high fidelity prototypes, testing and iterating. However, the struggle to have a concrete process in place when tackling a design challenge reduced my ability to track and document progress as well as to evaluate success. Therefore, I was excited to finally bring some levels of structure to the design process.

Early on during phase 1 which was all about understanding and discovering the problem, I got to conduct a user interview and proceeded to creating a persona, an experience map and an empathy map for a group project that involves an incremental innovation regarding productivity and strategic visualisation tool in a team setting (more details here). Now, I am entering phase 2 which primarily concerns with defining the problem. Thus, I learned another useful visualisation tool called the Value Proposition Canvas.

As a part of the Business Model Canvas, it is a visualised template that aims to help you find opportunities on which to base your ideas on. It consists of two sub templates: the customer profile and the value map. The outcomes of my group’s effort in building those two templates further reinforced the empathy map, experience map and persona that we created previously. For instance, when I was filling out the customer profile, the ‘customer jobs’ section are similar to the ‘stages’ of the experience map and the ‘needs’ of the persona as these visualisation tools focus on what the customers are trying to get done/achieve. An example that better illustrates the importance of this process was the customer job to ‘listen to music’ and how the music listening solutions evolved over the decades from physical artefacts like Vinyl, CDs to digital artefacts like Spotify and iTunes. This highlights how solutions can be obsolete and replaced over time, but the core job/needs remain the same. Therefore, it is crucial to not get hung up on creating the solution/technology but instead on finding out the roots of the customer’s problem/job and start from there.

What I think was the most helpful when doing the Value Proposition Canvas exercise was having the bridge between the ‘pains’ and ‘gains’ from the customer profile and the ‘pain relievers’ and ‘gain creators’. It really helped frame the product in a more user-centric way that also makes practical sense to the business attempting to create the solution based on the defined needs, pain points and opportunities.

To further developing the potential solution, our group adopted the 2x2 idea sorting maps with two dimensions: organizational efforts vs user experience. Since it is recommended to only tackle a few pains and gains and do them exceptionally well, I figure the same principle should also be applied to the proposed solutions. Thus, the 2x2 map helps positioning and visualising the ‘pain relievers’ and ‘gain creators’ on the different quadrants highlighting those that should receive higher priority, for both the business and the users. Perhaps, next time I would focus on distinguishing present and future ideas. Overall, it was a good mental exercise and further reinforces my confidence and knowledge in developing a strong foundation for design thinking.