What happened?

This week, we learned how to refine the target customer group by establishing customer portraits and early user roles. After class, I was responsible for conducting three user interviews and helping the team organise the research report. In teamwork, we improved efficiency through the role division mechanism (one person was responsible for interviews, one person took notes, and one person conducted empathy analysis). We also completed the preliminary research summary on the target users. Through this team research practice, I realized that user research and team collaboration skills are of great value to future positions such as user research. This laid the foundation for my subsequent data-driven decision-making and cross-functional collaboration capabilities.

So what?

At first, I was nervous about user interviews, especially when the questions were not specific enough and the interview feedback seemed vague. However, as I completed three interviews, I gradually found the rhythm of asking questions and learned to guide users to talk about their real needs. Through this experience, I realised that the core of entrepreneurs building value propositions is a verification process based on user feedback. This made me reflect on the fact that we often assumed user needs through our intuition in the past. However, the actual market needs need to be gradually explored through behavioural data and verification experiments.

This week, the team used role division and empathy analysis to significantly improve the efficiency of research. Everyone has a clear division of tasks. As a result, we are able to capture the real needs and emotions of users more accurately. This played a very important role in the interview process (Peixoto and Moura, 2020). This reflects how clearly defined roles and structured collaboration can enhance team performance and reduce conflict, aligning with Belbin’s team role theory (Belbin, 2010). This also further promotes efficient communication within the team. 

We adopted the interview empathy method. This ability to build value propositions based on real users is crucial for entrepreneurs. It is also widely used in UX design and business strategy (Kirchberger, Wouters and Anderson, 2020). In the future, I hope to continue to improve the ability to verify and iterate value based on behavioural data. This can further enable it to remain competitive in a data-driven business environment. However, in some interviews, we still encountered the “Intention-Action Gap”. That is, there is a gap between the needs expressed by users in the interview and their actual purchase intentions. This reminds us that simple user statements cannot fully represent their real behaviour (Bland & Osterwalder, 2020).

Now what?

Next, I plan to conduct at least 10 target user interviews and record them using a unified outline and classification table. This will ensure consistency and comparability of the data. In addition, I will actively learn how to use industry databases (such as Statista, IBISWorld, etc.). This can improve the reliability of our market capacity estimates. In the next stage, I will further refine the “user value” hypothesis based on what I learned this week.