Collaborative Product Design

Chapter 10. Identify Users with the Bull’s-Eye Canvas

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Identify Users with the Bull’s-Eye Canvas

The miller took his donkey to market to sell. People made fun of the miller. The donkey fell in a river and drowned. You don’t want that to happen again, so who do you design for? The miller who owns the donkey? The people who made fun of him? Or the donkey that drowned?

It’s difficult to make the right product decisions if you’re not sure who they’re for. Teams risk building the right features for the wrong users. Help your team identify the right users, so they build the right product for the right people.

Everyone on the team should understand who you’re building for and why. This chapter uses a bull’s-eye canvas to identify a product’s users and agree on who’s important. We’ll look at a formal version of this activity you can use as part of project kickoff or discovery workshops, but the approach works just as well in ad hoc conversations where you want to verify the user before providing feedback.

How User Identification Works

User mapping uses a bull’s-eye canvas to generate users and map them based on how they interact with or are affected by the product (Figure 10-1). The bull’s-eye uses four, concentric circles to organize users by how the product affects them. The center circle represents the product. Users who interact directly with the product go in the second circle. The third circle contains anyone they communicate or collaborate with, and the fourth circle is ...