Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Winter Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the HCDE field by industry experts. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.
Title: Hasslemaps, Theory of Constraints, and User Research
Date: January 13, 2012
Speaker: Skip Walter
When: Fridays, 12:30-1:20 PM
Where: Loew Hall, Room 206, UW Seattle campus
One of the most important and early parts of user research is to understand the workflows or value flows of the user being studied. For thirty years, Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints in conjunction with workflow mapping have guided research for workers in the enterprise. Until recently, a corresponding process and theory did not exist for consumers. With the publication of Adrian Slywotzky’s book Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It, there is now an excellent framework (hasslemaps) for placing the value flow of a consumer in context. With this context, valued solutions are easier to discover. This talk will compare and contrast Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints with Slywotzky’s Hasslemaps and point to when and where to use the respective techniques. During the talk we will discuss examples from Slywotsky’s book, from the use of this technique with HCDE class projects, and the use of these techniques with commercial tools like dScout in the context of loyalty marketing. Continue reading ’521 Seminar: Hasslemaps, Theory of Constraints, and User Research (1/13)’