Chapter 1: Users

In these blog posts we’ll go through the different chapters (11 in total) of the IT-Canvas. In this post we’ll focus on the first chapter: Users. Determining who your users will be is key during the development of your solution. It has a big impact whether you are focussing on mass consumers or smaller number of business users. Will you design your solution in such a way it can scale to 1.000.000 users and how will you do this? Will you for example reuse existing login services from the likes of Google and Facebook or will you focus on business users and what are their requirements.

Changes in this chapter will also influence other chapters like chapter 2 channels, 3 data or chapter 8 architecture. There are start-ups that selected a partner to build their solution because of their speed but after a successful 6 months wanted to scale from 1.000 to 100.000 users had to completely rebuild their solution and select another partner for this. This set them back >6 months and could have been avoided if they included this in their original selection criteria.

In the beginning really find out who your users (you can use the Persona Canvas for this) are, how do they use technology and what trends are there in the market. Where is your target group active and what existing technologies or platforms can you use.

In the beginning you will focus on more exploratory questions to really understand who your users are, how they use technology and trends there are in the market. Later when you have more clarity on your users you will look at how this will impact your potential solution and all the different chapters. And as your initiative progresses and you validate more keep checking what impact it has on your users chapter. Are you maybe going to a new country where they use different platforms (e.g. WeChat in China) or maybe focussing on a new segment like SME’s and what impact does that have.

Plenty of interesting things to dive into and to validate. If you have any suggestions how to improve this chapter please reach out and drop us a line!