Collaborative Product Design

Chapter 11. Explore User Attributes with the Profile Canvas

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Explore User Attributes with the Profile Canvas

Someone shared a report interface they were building. “Looks nice,” I said. “What’s the user trying to do here? Why do they look at this report?” They didn’t know. How can I provide feedback if I don’t know what the user’s trying to do?

Once you start designing and building, your users and their needs should drive most decisions. Teams have the same two problems with users that they have with other aspects of the project. Either they haven’t all agreed on who their users are, or they haven’t learned the right information about their users. You can help your team come to a shared understanding about the user that includes the exact information they need, and nothing more.

In this chapter, we’ll look at how teams can gather around the user profile canvas and discuss, explore, and agree on who their users are, their tasks, contexts, influencers, and even goals and jobs-to-be-done.

Even though I typically create user profile canvases to kick off project discovery, you can create them any time and are encouraged to revisit them constantly.

How the User Profile Canvas Works

The user profile canvas creates a visual checklist that helps teams think about a user’s tasks, contexts, and influencers. The user profile canvas creates a single space where the team can collect a user’s attributes. Information collected can derive from research insights or the team’s tacit knowledge ...