
Jobs to Be Done Framework Is More Useful Than Personas - kartickv
https://medium.com/@karti/jobs-to-be-done-for-a-camera-f5bb8c1c5316
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troelsSteegin
My thinking about user frameworks reduces to two dimensions: intentions and
capabilities.

Intentions express what a given population of users is trying to acheive. As a
designer you need to situate where your interfaces are relation to that. Jobs
to be done is useful for modeling intentions in part because it expressly
looks at utility from a subjective (user's or buyer's) perspective and because
the metric is simple.

Capabilities express what the user knows, is used to, and is motivated to
learn. What skills and mindset does a user bring to thinking about and working
with your solution. I have found personas useful as a shorthand for modeling
capabilities.

In both dimensions, intentions and capabilities, there is a mixture across a
given target market. You can look at different products as addressing
different clusters in that space.

From a design/dev perspective, I think about intentions as the benefit side of
what we're building, features provide benefits through satisfying intentions,
and the capabilities on the cost side, that features should be "free" in terms
of the percieved tax that our solution levies in terms of user's effort,
attention, or learning.

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barrysaunders
Jobs to be done is helpful to get a baseline understanding of what problem you
want to solve. However personas and more detailed design work will help you
understand your audience and their motivations. This helps you figure out if
you’re building VSCO or Facetune.

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acidbaseextract
_This helps you figure out if you’re building VSCO or Facetune._

This is a perfect example of where JtbD is stronger than personas. There are
lots of people who use both VSCO and Facetune. The thing differentiating those
two cases is what they intend to do with a photo, the job to be done. Another
simple example of this type is YouTube vs TikTok. How are the personas
different?

The case for personas is stronger within a specific task, for example: iMovie
vs Final Cut Pro, ffmpeg vs Adobe Media Encoder. Even then it's not the touchy
feely aspects of personas that bring value, but instead the basic market
segmentation.

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evolve2k
How’s jobs to be done much different from people just talking about what
should the key features of our app be?

One big benefit of personas is towards bringing the ideal customer into the
room when making decisions. Comments from those involved in building the
software along the lines ‘well I wouldn’t use that feature’, shift to ‘well
what would Anne want?’. Without personas embedded bias of the product team
remain unaddressed and undifferentiated.

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kartickv
Before you can talk about what the key features should be, you should identify
what jobs the customer is hiring the product to do. That anchors the
discussion; otherwise you'll be talking in a vacuum about whether to build
feature X or Y without anchoring it to a job the product needs to do.

The jobs to be done framework too brings the customer into the room. If we're
building a photo editor, and I say, "I wouldn't use a feature that makes lips
red and removes pimples", then we can talk about the job the photo editor is
being hired to do, like "make me look pretty on Instagram". I can put forward
my bias like "I don't care about that" and someone can counter that.

