Finally, a JTBD description typically captures the functional success criteria (the objective, clear requirements for this job to be successful), as well as the emotional success criteria (which may be further broken down into the users’ individual emotional criteria, and any social considerations, such as how they imagine they’ll be perceived by others). While the JTBD approach does not prescribe a specific format or deliverable, most often a job-to-be-done is defined in sentence format, noting what users have to do, and any key contextual information, such as why or where they do it. Oftentimes, we hear JTBD advocates referring to the famous Theodore Levitt quote, “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Rather than focusing on a list of features for a product, the JTBD framework forces designers to think about outcomes: would users be able to (happily and easily) complete the job they “hired” the product for? Does this solution provide a better outcome than existing ones? However, radical innovation can be a costly and risky product-improvement strategy. The JTBD framework suggests that innovation and good design come from assessing the customers’ real needs, and creating a solution that is unencumbered by the existing products that fulfil those needs. Task analysis and use cases aim to understand the best way in which the product can handle the typical activities that users need to do (and often end up being biased by existing solutions) the JTBD approach moves the focus on desired outcomes and questions whether those typical activities are the way of reaching the outcomes that users really seek.įor example, if a traditional task analysis unearthed that delivery drivers frequently needed to print out directions that showed how to navigate between each stop on their daily route, it’s likely that the design team would focus on making it as easy as possible for the drivers to format and print the directions however, a JTBD-focused approach would focus on the delivery driver’s “job” (that is, getting navigation guidance while driving), and would look for solutions to that problem (such as a GPS system providing voice guidance). The core differentiator between JTBD and these traditional system-analysis techniques is that JTBD is much less prescriptive about what exactly the users’ task is, and how they will accomplish it. While the JTBD framework is new, it is similar in many ways to established methods such as task analysis and use cases, which focus on the context, goals, and steps involved in the interaction with a product. Armed with this understanding, a product team can think about the nature of the users’ core problems and needs from a fresh perspective, and devise product features that solve that main need as best as possible. It involves identifying for which goals customers “hire” your product (and, ideally, also finding out if there are competitor products that these users are ready to “fire”). The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework is a representations of user needs born out of qualitative user research, such as field studies, interviews, and discount usability testing. Jobs-to-Be-Done: A Useful Tool to Focus on Outcomes Rather than Features This point of view is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of personas as primarily demographic representations of users, missing the key behavioral considerations that are essential to good personas and that provide much needed guidance for interaction design and product strategy. With the popularity of the JTBD paradigm, there are calls in some corners to abandon personas, suggesting that JTBD has emerged as a more useful technique. The set of “jobs” for the product amounts to a comprehensive list of user needs. Personas have long been a useful tool in a user-centered design process however, in recent years, jobs-to-be done, a new technique for focusing on customer needs, has been gaining steady prominence.ĭefinition: Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a framework based on the idea that whenever users “hire” (i.e., use) a product, they do it for a specific “job” (i.e., to achieve a particular outcome).
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