One of the best skills a designer can have is empathy with the user.  And one of the best ways to achieve empathy is by looking at things from the user’s perspective using scenarios.

Scenarios have been around a while in different forms and flavors, but I haven’t found the standard formulations entirely satisfactory.  They are either too verbose, or too unstructured, or not scalable, or they don’t articulate the underlying need or explain why the need exists to begin with.

Over time I converged on a different, simpler way of composing scenarios which I thought worth sharing. I have been using this technique since 2002.

Elements of a SSNiF Scenario

The technique is based on the observation that there is a common storyline and set of elements to all good scenarios.  There is a stakeholder, typically a user or customer or persona, in some situation.  The situation results in a need. The need is resolved by a feature, or by the product as a whole.

The first three elements, Stakeholder, Situation, and Need, express the problem.  The Feature is the solution.  Adding a gratuitous “i” to suggest a pronounciation spells SSNiF.

I like the metaphor: on a new project we need to SSNiF out the domain to make sense of it, as a dog sniffs out strange new territory.  To test whether a proposed idea is a good one, we SSNiF it out.

Big SSNiFs

SSNiFs come in two sizes, big and little.  Big SSNiFs describe the overall purpose of a product or feature.  Little SSNiFs delve into detailed use cases.  They describe why individual features exist, or aspects of the design.

Let’s look at some big SSNiFs related to the iPod.  One key group of stakeholders are those who must take public transportation on a regular basis.  The journey is long, repetitive, and boring — that is the situation.  The need that results is for something to make the idle time more enjoyable.  The iPod is the solution that addresses the need.

We can lay this scenario out in a SSNiF table.  I’ve added a few other Big SSNiFs representing other key usage scenarios of the iPod:

Some Big SSNiFs for a portable audio device

These Big SSNiFs clarify why the product is needed. In fact, the essence of a product concept can be conveyed in terms of few Big SSNiFs.  With a tight set of Big SSNiFs in hand you should have no trouble conveying to someone what problem the product will solve for customers.

Little SSNiFs

Whereas Big SSNiF are for clarifying the big picture, little SSNiFs are for working out the details. Here are some little SSNiFs of mass transit commuters:

Notice how each feature is connected back to its underlying use cases.  We could enumerate all of the features this way, tracing them to their purpose.

How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process

SSNiFs are involved at each level of the Design Pyramid.

• At the Understanding level, customers research is made more actionable by synthesizing it down to a set of big and little SSNiFs.
  
• At the Vision level, we can sift through the all the big SSNiFs we discovered, and sculpt a product vision out of the right set of Big SSNiFs.
• At the Requirements level, we can play out the Big SSNiFs into lots of little SSNiFs.  SSNiFs make wonderful requirements, as I’ll get to in a minute.
• At the Design level, we create a solution with the scenarios in mind.  We test our design by walking through the selected big and little SSNiFs from each stakeholder’s perspective, asking ourselves, “does the solution we came through truly address the SSNiF?”

If you chose important SSNiFs, and if your solution addresses them, you will have a pretty good product.

So what’s the big deal?

SSNiF scenarios have a number of benefits:

SSNiFs are relentlessly user-centric. SSNiFs force us to figure out not just what users need but why.  This emphasis on understanding why is unique to this method.  Knowing why is the test of true mastery over the user’s world.  It is what lets us interpolate and extrapolate from what customers are able to articulate to us directly.  It is a critical aptitude for visionary thinking.

The purpose behind each feature is clear at all times. Every feature is connected to the scenario it addresses.  You will appreciate this if you have encountered features in your product whose existence no-one can explain.

Real-life SSNiF table in Excel

SSNiFs distinguish stakeholders – There is a common trap of thinking of “the user” as part of a single, homogeneous bunch.  You cannot fall into this trap if you do SSNiFs, because identifying differing stakeholders is inherent in the process. SSNiFs help us stay connected to to the different worlds of different audiences.

SSNiFs are scalable enough allow you to model as many narrow user groups as you come across in the real world.  You can capture and model what you see without oversimplifying it.  This is useful because observations about obscure groups and their predicaments is grist for the idea mill.

SSNiFs give us a place to capture the hot feature ideas, but without committing to them.  No designer enjoys it when our colleagues wildly jump ahead to the feature they envisioned while taking a shower.  We’d rather have a calm conversation about what the requirements are, then work out the best possible solution from there.  Designers are always trying to get product managers to think in terms of requirements, not concrete features.

In practice though, our human brains can’t help but think in terms of the concrete.  SSNiFs offer a compromise: it gives us a slot to place our (possibly lame) initial solution as long as (a) we agree to call it the potential feature, and (b) we back-fill the other columns of the SSNiF.  The spontaneous feature idea then turns into a vehicle for getting at the scenario.  The initial solution is traced back to the problem (where the important part of the idea lies anyway), and from there we can move forward and see if we can find a better solution to the SSNiF.

Which leads to the next benefit:

SSNiFs leave the door open to a better solution – By labeling a feature as potential, we are making it clear that this is a tentative idea on how we might solve the need.  The door is open to other potential approaches.  If someone comes up with a better way to solve it, we’re happy to toss the earlier concept.  Because this is built into the process, this helps prevent us from getting too wedded to our ideas.

SSNiFs make user research more actionable – Have you ever attended a fascinating, informative research presentation that was completely forgotten by the following morning?  The problem is that the findings just are not boiled down to an actionable format.

I have found that almost all of the actionable findings from ethnographic research boil down to either SSNiFs or “key observations and their potential implications to the product” (the subject of a future article).  SSNiFs go a long way towards making user research actionable.

Anyone doing basic user research should try distilling their findings down into a prioritized table of SSNiFs.

SSNiFs provide a reality check – To fill in a SSNiF that backs a proposed feature you must ask some key questions: “What need does it solve?  For whom?  Under what circumstances?”

Merely asking these questions puts the new idea in perspective.  We’ll find that there just aren’t that many users of that type, or that the situation just doesn’t come up that often, or that when it does, the need is not terribly strong.  At this point we should take a courageous gulp and just cut the feature.  Worthwhile features will have solid answers to these questions.

Next time someone proposes a feature, try asking the three key SSNiF questions to see what is behind it.

SSNiFs are thorough – some approaches to scenarios buckle under the weight of complex-real world design problems.  They become onerous to author, review and maintain.  SSNiFs scale easily from a handful to scores or even hundreds of SSNiFs for large-scale initiatives.

Process benefits

As a process for capturing scenarios, they have more benefits:

SSNiFs are easy to understand – a SSNiF table makes sense to anyone on first reading.  Others can jump in and start contributing right away by following examples.

SSNiFs are concise – SSNiFs distill the minimum and sufficient elements of a scenario into a tabular form.  This makes it possible to categorize, prioritize, sort and filter any numbers of SSNiFs.

My preferred medium for capturing SSNiFs is the spreadsheet.  I use Excel when capturing lots of little SSNiFs just before doing a design.  I’ll even capture SSNiFs live, while conducting customer interviews, dropping new insights into any of the four columns and back-filling the other columns later.

SSNiFs work in a group process – Initial SSNiFs can be captured using a spreadsheet projected onto a screen or with a wall of sticky notes.  I also have had success with Google Spreadsheets, because it allows anyone on the team to annotate or refine the SSNiFs at any time.  (See also: Free templates for SSNiFs)

SSNiFs get everyone’s assumptions on the table – It is fascinating what comes out of a group SSNiF process. Different team members will have different insights, ideas and scenarios weightings.  SSNiFs provide a medium to capture the “best of” multiple peoples’ perspectives.  When a fundamental difference in belief about a user scenario arises, we can add it to a “to be researched” list and get to the bottom of the discrepancy later.

More examples of SSNiF Scenarios

Here are some prior articles that involve SSNiFs:

• Open, yet encrypted Wi-Fi
• Hosted vs. Local applications
• Marriage Sav-R Toothpaste Tube
• Who Read your Email this Morning?

Summary

SSNiFs are a concise way to model scenarios that emphasizes the connection between features of a product and the underlying customer scenario and need.

Please give SSNiFs a try and feel free to write me with questions or comments at: phaine at obvious design dot com.

Continue to Part 2: How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process >>

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

[6/24/09 Did editing pass based on feedback]

MyOwnBags come in many fabrics and colors

Ania designed a bag that she would want to use:

• strong enough to carry a heavy load of groceries
• light and compactable so it could be squished into its own little pouch and kept in a woman’s purse whenever she needed it
• large capacity so that multiple bags are not needed on a small shopping trip
• versatile, so it could be used not just for groceries but for yoga, gym, beach, clothes shopping, changes of clothes
• fashionable, to look good while being eco. They come in many fabrics and do not have huge gaudy phrases trumpeting the owner’s environmental sensitivity
• washable, so the bag can withstand grocery detritus and can be used for a long time without looking dirty and ratty

Ania created her reusable bags years before they became commonplace and way before progressive municipalities like San Francisco started banning plastic bags. Now there are dozens of players in the game. Amazingly, the MyOwnBag product vision has held up well against the flood of competitors:

• Grocery stores sell canvas bags that look like stiff green shopping bags. Pretty good for reducing waste but you cannot keep it in your purse at the ready.
• Many companies sell $5 nylon bags that fold into nothing. They are commendable for making something that can be carried around, and cheap enough that anyone could buy them. But they are typically over-branded and look like garbage bags when freed from their sac. You wouldn’t be seen with it for other trips around town.
• Hermès, Louis Vuitton and others have designer grocery bags for fashionistas willing to pay $500 – $1700.
• Various gym, yoga or beach bags are optimized for their stated purpose but are not meant for groceries

Here is what this comparison looks like in a needs table, which includes the original comparison points, paper and plastic bags (3 is better; 0 is worse):

Needs table comparing various types of shopping bags

The needs analysis clarifies the differentiation among these competitors. For each customer need along the top you can see which solution does a good job of solving it. You can compare any two solutions and immediately see the important differences between them and which niche each has carved out.

From this chart you can see that MyOwnBag is the only reusable shopping bag that squishes down to a little pouch, and is useful for for things other than grocery shopping, and is chic and may be worn proudly around town, without costing $500.

There is one other need which MyOwnBag solves excellently: your need to find a unique gift for your chic, environmentally-sensitive friend, for about $40 to $60.

Warning: do not give her a plastic bag.

.

For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles

I plunked down my credit card no more than five minutes after seeing David Creemer’s mention of the Chumby.

Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose.

The Chumby Internet device, about $195 shipped.

That no-specific-purpose part partitions people who hear about the Chumby. Some see it as its greatest weakness, others see it as its greatest strength. I’m in the latter camp. I think the potential and relevance of this class of device is enormous. Here are some scenarios:

Alarms of every stripe: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to sell Google. It’s time to move the car for street cleaning. My checking balance is getting low; better transfer some funds. Oh my, something big exploded somewhere. Oops, we left the garage door open. Looks like a storm is brewing. Uh-oh, traffic is bad on 101. Oooh, Tahoe got a huge dump of snow. Oh! Was that an earthquake? How big, and how far? Hurry! Wii’s are available! Shh! Stay low! There is someone at the front door and he’s carrying a clipboard!

Ambient awareness: What time is it? How many minutes before my next appointment? Ah, my web traffic is growing nicely, and I even made $0.42 this week with Adsense. Cool, there’s the updated status of a bunch of my Facebook friends. It’s Friday night and three of my friends have no plans; maybe I will call them. Hmmm, it’s only foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not everywhere How does it look in St. Catherine’s Street in Montreal? Does the baby look ok with the nanny? We’ve been using a lot of energy this month. Philip’s birthday is in a few days.

Control: Time to put the house lights, climate and security in bed-time mode / away for the evening mode / away for vacation mode. Time to put on ambient jazz or groove or drone or classical or acoustic chick rock or energetic rock throughout the house to suit the current mood. Tell the DVR to record Heroes and Earl.

Tools: Alarm clock. Kitchen timer. Game timer. My favorite Epicurious recipes. The family calendar in the kitchen.

Decoration: Ah there are photos showing what I was doing every year this month for as long as I have been collecting digital pictures.

Communication: Receive a video voicemail. Press a couple of buttons and record a voice message to your spouse.

On-demand radio: Listen to the latest NPR news broadcast in the bathroom, when you are shaving.

One could go on. I could imagine several Chumby’s around the house as views and controllers being fed by the same model. (Our mobile phones would take part, too.)

One piece apparently missing on the platform is a coherent infrastructure for pulling together alarms, ambient awareness, control, and tools. From what I can tell, the first batch of applets will be disjointed, inconsistent, mostly useless. The signal-to-noise ratio of useful vs. demo applets is too low, as happened with Palm apps and desktop widgets.

But with the Chumby, the technology and price point have arrived. The only thing in the way of most of these scenarios is a mere matter of design and code.

A recent NYTimes article, “With Popcorn, DVD’s and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home” describes the decline in moviegoing:

“With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained – a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.”

The lack of certainty about the underlying cause is not helpful. When a business is in peril it must identify the right cause: the correct explanation leads to action that can save the business; the wrong explanation can lead to actions which hasten failure.

This problem is of interest to us because it’s an instance of a common strategic predicament: an established class of products is being threatened by the emergence of a new class of products. Is the newcomer merely a passing fad? Or is it a disruptive innovation that will render the incumbent obsolete?

We will look at these questions using our preferred tool for the job, Formal Needs Analysis. We will first deconstruct moviegoing into the the primary customer needs it satisfies, then consider how well those needs are met by the competitors, in this case TiVo-style DVRs, Netflix, the web and videogames. This will isolate the points of overlap, clarifying when the alternates are as good or better than the incumbent.

What needs are met by moviegoing?

To model moviegoing and its competitors, we’ve established a needs space of seven primary needs and four supporting needs. Primary needs are the key reasons people purchase a product. For movies, we have:

1. The need to escape – to temporarily get away from the incessant stresses and pressures of life.
2. The need to feel good – to be put in a happy mood, say after a difficult week.
3. The need for stimulation – to be raised into a heightened emotional & physiological state.
4. The need to learn things – to be left with the new knowledge or insight into the human experience
5. The need for social interaction – to feel connected with others.
6. The need for social status – to feel worthy within the social group. With respect to pop culture including movies, it feels good to be in-the-know and it feels bad to be left out of the conversation everyone else is having.
7. The need for fun – to have a good time in the moment.

In addition, there are these supporting needs. Supporting needs help the product fulfill its primary needs better. They are like salt to french fries: salt makes the food taste better, but you don’t buy you buy the fries soley for the salt. For moviegoing, we have the following supporting needs:

1. The need for affordability – other things being equal, the more affordable a product, the more desirable.
2. The need convenience - another cost the customer incurs is non-monetary — the logistical hassle in using it.
3. The need relevance - Relevance of a piece of content is how well it relates to you. When it comes to matters of taste or interest, different folks require different strokes. Thus for content, relevance is largely a function of the breadth of selection available.
4. The need for long experience – the persistence of the experience.

Let’s walk through each of these to see how movies and the newcomers compare. We’ve assigned rough scores from zero to three to each competitor in the table below for reference.

Primary needs

Summary of needs fulfilled by moviegoing and its comparison points, rated from 0 to 3

1. The need for escape

Movies do a good job of providing escape. A darkened movie theatre away from home, interesting characters and an intriguing plot can immerse the viewer in an alternate reality.

Netflix shows the same movies, but at home. This experience is not as immersive as in a theatre, but the gap is narrowed for those fortunate enough to possess a decent home theatre. TiVo or web surfing can provide escape for hours, but today’s best videogames provide immersion to such an extent that time flies.

2-4. The need to feel good, for stimulation, to learn things

The movie industry is adept at crafting films that play directly against different emotional needs. The need to feel good is literally matched by the Hollywood “feel-good” movies. The need for stimulation, both emotional and physiological, is provided by thrillers, sci-fi, action and suspense movies. The need to learn things is met by watching characters in dramas and by documentaries.

As for the comparison points, Netflix has the same content and thus the same potential, minus some points for the less immersive experience. TiVo loses points for commercial interruptions (skippable though they may be) and for lower audio/visual quality relative to DVDs. (We could have added a/v quality as a secondary need.) Videogames can be extremely stimulating. Web surfing may not exactly be emotionally stirring, but it has great potential to help anyone learn anything about anything at any time.

5. The need for social interaction

While watching a movie is itself passive and solitary, going out to the movies is social in multiple ways. Going through an experience with friends makes it more enjoyable and gives common references for future conversation. A crowded movie theatre also provides a lighter version of the mob experience common at sporting events or huge rock concerts. Finally, if we take moviegoing to include activities before and after such as travel, dinner and drinks, there is ample opportunity for personal bonding.

Watching the same movie at home with Netflix or TiVo is rarely as social. Videogames played alone are decidedly not social. But endless hours spent playing videogames with friends is a strong bonding experience.

6. The need for social status

Coolness points are gained or lost based on how up-to-date one is with the latest trends. The movie industry plays this up well, fostering the notion of the must-see movie. You just have to watch it (otherwise what good are you?).

But while watching every top movie may necessary for hipness, but it is not sufficient. No medium has a monopoly on conferring social status. One must also be up to date on the latest TV shows, sports standings, celebrity gossip, fashion, videogames, news, technology and blogs.

We can say that the Netflix movie, arriving in the mailbox months after the playground or water cooler chatter has moved on to something new, is not so hip anymore.

7. The need for fun

The prior needs don’t completely capture the overall feeling of fun and excitement of going out to the movies, so we included it as another dimension of need. It overlaps some of the others, but that’s okay; we are free to choose the dimensions that give us useful insight.

Staying home and watching TV or TiVo or Netflix isn’t quite as fun. But high quality videogames can still be an addictive blast.

Supporting needs

8. The need affordability

Moviegoing is expensive. Aside from the ticket cost there are ancillary costs of parking and dinner. TV, Netflix and videogames are far more affordable per hour of use, and thus they get betters scores on the need for affordability.

9. The need for convenience

Going out to see a movie incurs non-monetary costs of time and logistics. One must get to and from the theatre, park and wait in lines. Staying home is far more convenient.

10. The need for relevance/choice

The Matrix and A Room With a View are highly compelling for their respective audiences, and highly irrelevant to one another’s. When it comes to content, relevance is gained through breadth of choice. The movies offer just a couple of dozen choices at any one time.

Regular TV has dozens of channels, yet there is often nothing to watch. TiVo, on the other hand, filters through thousands of channel-hours a week, leaving the viewer with a concentrated set of extremely relevant programming. Netflix offers an impressive selection of 50,000 movies, old TV programs and special-interest content findable nowhere else.

As for videogames, there is not as yet something for everyone. Many have no interest in videogames at all.

11. The need for a long experience

The moviegoing experience, fun and immersive as it may be, is fleeting. On the other hand, people can spend hours a day with TV, TiVo, videogames and web surfing.

Conclusions & Predictions

Now that we’ve broken moviegoing and its challengers into its component needs, what can we make of all this? Is the bad fortune of moviegoing due to a passing spate of poor product? Or is it indicative of deeper, long-term trends to other media? By walking through the chart above we can lay out some specific conclusions and predictions:

• Moviegoing is still a unique product. Its needs profile — its row in the chart above — is distinct from the others. None of the alternatives are a superset. This suggests that moviegoing will not be obviated by new media (the way that word processors obviated typewriters), but will live alongside them.
• Moviegoing has specific advantages. It is a better escape than home media, more engaging and more social. A night of moviegoing is simply more fun than staying home and watching the same thing at home. First release movies are also trendy and confer social status on those who watch the blockbusters early.
• Moviegoing has weaknesses relative to its competitors. It is costly, both monetarily and in convenience. The home media is far more convenient. Moviegoing is also a fleeting, and leaves discretionary time for other products to fill. The comparison points, TiVo, videogames and the web can occupy the user for hours without extra cost.
• The competitors pose real and specific threats. Videogames are an excellent escape. Netflix and TiVo let the user select from thousands of choices, thereby greatly increasing the relevance and appeal. Videogames played with friends fulfill needs for social interaction.
• All of these dynamics are about the medium of moviegoing itself, not the content within that medium. The threat is systemic, not a result of a spate of poor movies.
• Video-over-the-net has the potential to meet a superset of the needs met by Netflix. Current offerings are of lower a/v quality and limited selection, but this can change. Once it does, the DVD-by-mail model will become niche.
• While moviegoing will persist, it won’t be without pain to the industry. The competition for discretionary time is hot, leaving less of the pie for the movies than they are used to. Movie attendance can be expected to decline, even if quality recovers.

How can the movie industry respond to these threats? I will save that for another article.

.

For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles