Imagine that it’s the late 1800s, and you are a manufacturer of pocket-knives. You have a loyal customer base that really loves your product — and your knives are proven performers in the marketplace. But, you’ve noticed a curious thing: an increasing number of your most faithful clients have been bringing their knives back to your shop for repair. It seems that the tips of the blades have been bending.
This comes as some surprise because, after all, your knives are crafted from the finest, tempered steel. But, as it turns out, the problem is not the quality of your product, nor a flaw in their design. As your customers quickly explain, the problem is that they’d been using the knives in a rather unconventional way — not as they were intended to be used, but exactly as they were needed in the moment.
In the case of the bent tips, each one of those customers had been using the knife-blade… to undo and tighten screws! This intrigues you. Why wouldn’t they just have used a screwdriver?
So, you meet with your customers to ask them why they’d use a pocket-knife to turn a screw.
You soon discover that there isn’t one answer. Sometimes it was just handier for them to use the knife. Sometimes the pocket-knife was all they could carry. Sometimes, as it turned out, your product was more versatile, because the tip could easily slip into a screw-slot of any size. And sometimes, your customers simply didn’t want to buy a whole new tool, especially if your pocket-knife could be adapted to the task.
Of course, some carpenters — those who worked all day long with nothing but screws — would probably have a whole box of diversified screwdrivers. But what a lot of people seemed to need, was a small, light, adaptable screwdriver that was always at hand. These were your customers. So, in the end, there was only one thing to do. Meet their need. Ease their struggle: A fold-out screwdriver — incorporated into the knife.
No more bent tips. More happy users.
Now, imagine that it’s early 2016. And you are the team at Moqups, a wireframing and prototyping platform.
Up to this point, you’ve lacked a native diagramming tool. But your users are nothing if not creative — and they’ve been designing workarounds — figuring out how to create their own diagrams inside Moqups. This comes as some surprise to your team.
It turns out that some have made diagrams — outside of Moqups — and then imported them, as objects, into Moqups pages. Others have used existing stencils, such as rectangles, lines and icons, to improvise amazingly complex diagrams within Moqups itself.
And although these hacks were ingenious, both could be quite tedious — and creatively disruptive. The first demanded that users jump between platforms when adding inevitable updates — keeping two versions of the diagram in sync. The latter required constant, time-consuming maintenance and rearrangement — object by object, line by line, arrow by arrow. But, in spite of these obstacles, your customers had done it anyway.
So, in the end, there was only one thing to do. Meet their need. Ease their struggle:
A fully-integrated, intelligent and streamlined diagramming tool built right within Moqups 2.
No more tedious workarounds. More happy users.
Imagine that!
This fable was inspired by our new Diagramming tool in Moqups 2. For the nitty gritty — and to see it in action — check out our blog post.
