On preprinted, poster-sized calendars or on a simple timeline drawn on a large sheet of paper, ask your customers to describe the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly events that are related to their use of your product. Ask them to describe events in time frames appropriate for your product—beginnings and ends of days or weeks, recurring events such as birthdays, one-time events such as installing a new software system, special events that are unique to an industry or sector (like a conference), or days in which everything goes horribly wrong and they’re looking for help. While they’re doing this, be alert for how your product helps, or hinders, their day.

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When we ask customers something about our product, they usually respond to our question based on their most recent experiences. Unfortunately, this creates a skewed view of how a product works throughout its natural life cycle. By explicitly asking your customers the when of using a product, you’ll substantially increase your ability to understand the how to make it better. More generally, Start Your Day is about exploring different contexts in which your customers use your product. In the game, you vary the time context. As you do this, pay attention to how other contexts change. For example, you might find that your customer uses your email/scheduling program at the beginning of the day from their home office and at the end of the day from their work office. These locations are quite different, and understanding how they differ provides you with substantial insight into the problems your customer is trying to solve. This understanding, in turn, leads to innovations. You can enhance this game by varying other aspects of product use and then exploring these effects with your customers while they are working on their calendars. Suppose, for example, that you were a manufacturer of binoculars. In addition to posting calendars, you could post the following:

• Pictures of different locations—Ask cus tomers to tell you how they use binoculars at sporting events, at the opera, at the park, at the beach, and in the woods.

• Pictures of situations with varying amounts of ambient light—Ask customers to tell you how they use binoculars in conditions of bright sunlight, normal light, dawn, dusk, and in the middle of the night.

• Pictures of people in different physical and/or emotional states—Ask customers to tell you how they use binoculars when they are carrying other things, such as during a hiking trip, when they are tired (after a long day of hiking), or when they're excited (perhaps because they have just glimpsed the rare ruby-throated humming bird).

The good news is that when you've made the time context explicit, it is relatively easy to vary other things and get very useful information.

Selecting the customers who will produce the best results is a common theme throughout the book. In this game, it helps to consider how different customers may be affected by time and then select customers who fit different time profiles. For example, if you’re interested in how school schedules impact a parent’s use of your product, you may want to include parents who send their children to public schools, parents who send their children to private schools, parents who home school their children, and parents who employ tutors or nannies. Each of these schooling options creates different time demands on parents.

This also means that you must focus your efforts on producing calendars that are specific to the question you’re asking. If you’re asking customers about their child care needs, you might find that a poster of the school year is the most useful representation of time. If you’re asking about their use of athletic gear, you need to match the calendars to the sport.

Make certain that you also hang several blank sheets of paper. Although our use of a product or service is influenced by time, it is also influenced by events. By allowing your customers to record and share key events that motivate or adjust their use of your product, you’ll gain greater, richer understanding into their underlying needs.

Give each participant a different colored pen so that you can keep track of which customer made what comment on the posters.

If you have more than one person from the same company or family participating, consider giving each of them different colored pens so that you can track each person’s contributions.

Give customers a simple way to agree with what other customers say they do with your products. My favorite approach for signaling agreement is to let customers place a brightly colored sticker, such as a gold star or a word like “Yeah” or “Excellent,” next to something that someone else has written. Stickers keep the mood fun, and the different words that customers choose provide you with additional opportunities to ask them specific questions regarding why they chose that particular word to signify agreement.

Customers often need a bit of prompting with this exercise. You can help them by giving them a warm-up exercise, such as asking them how they use gardening equipment at different times of the year. Do they use the garden hose to wash their car, water their lawn, or add water to their children’s sand box? You can also help them by preparing timelines and/or events that are appropriate for your product. After you have given customers a few minutes to think about how they use your product, ask them to take a walk around the room and look at each of the calendars that you’ve printed out in poster format. This will give them a chance to consider the different time frames that you have chosen.

After customers start writing down how they use your product or service, encourage them to take several passes through the calendars. Looking at how other customers have used your product will almost certainly help them remember similar experiences of their own.

When all customers have finished writing their entries on the posters, the facilitator announces a break of about 15 minutes. During the break, the photographer should take a set of photos of the final customer entries. After customers return, the facilitator should review the entries, confirming the results and engaging participants in a discussion about unusual or confusing entries. The facilitator may add clarifying notes to what is written, ideally using a 3"35" or 5"38" index card placed next to the original customer entry; this allows you to retain the original entry as well as the clarifying note. When finished, the facilitator should thank participants and end the game, and the photographer should take one final set of photos of the customer entries along with any of the facilitator’s notes.

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Using the original materials and photos, transcribe every customer entry into a spreadsheet that is organized by the same time frame in which the comment was made, keeping track of which customer made each entry, along with any clarifying text from the participant discussion. This means that if you used three calendars during the game, one based on a single day, another on a month, and a third on an entire year, you should have at least three spreadsheets organized around the same time frames. You might be tempted to put each entry into a single spreadsheet, but this approach often fails to match customers’ perceptions of time.

Associate additional attributes with each entry so that you can better understand patterns and trends. Attributes that you may find useful and what you can do with them include the following:

• The degree to which this is the intended use of your product, ranging from a simple yes/no to a scale from 1 to 3 or 1 to 5. A product that has many unintended uses can be the most challenging to understand. On one hand, the product may be selling well because of these unintended uses, which tends to make people happy because market share and profits are good. But this unintended result is rarely what you want. One problem is that the real market need, and the one that motivated the creation of the product in the first place, is left unanswered. Another problem is that if the product is selling well based on unintended use, what might happen if the company actually identified the right target market and promoted the product to them? Could sales double or triple? Keep in mind that not all unintended uses of a product represent improper design. Indeed, a few unintended uses are usually a benefit, as they help the product team identify new opportunities. Finally, note that unintended uses include things that might appear normal at the surface but upon closer inspection reveal a novel or unintended use. For example, consider the number of people who keep track of “to do” items by adding “appointments” to their calendars.

• The degree to which your team was surprised by this use of your product, again using a simple "yes/no" or more complex numeric scale. The greater the surprise, the greater the opportunity for identifying and/or marketing your product to a new set of customers or for increasing use of your product by existing customers.

• Your customers' perceptions of how easy it was to use your product to accomplish the task they described. Tasks that your product supports should be retained. Tasks that are difficult to accomplish are clear opportunities for improvement.

• The number of customers who indicated they used the product in a similar manner; consensus strengthens the points described previously.

Calendars in both normal and large print format. Consider the following time formats:

• Day-by-Hour (all 24)

• Week-by-Day

• Monthly

• Year by Month

• Year by Quarter

• Seasons

• Holidays

See figure 1 and figure 2.

Every market is governed by one-time and recurring events. As you prepare for Start Your Day, consider how you can use market events and market rhythms to better understand your customers. To illustrate, several years ago I tried to start a company to promote financial literacy for children and young adults through specially designed parent-controlled financial services. The company never got off the ground, but the research was fascinating. In this case, I found capturing events that signify increasing financial literacy, such as a child’s first purchase or a young adult’s first job, as “Life Firsts” helpful. The recurring events mapped into the rhythms of American culture that are present every year, but change based on age. There is quite a difference in how a 10-year-old and 16-year-old boy approaches Valentine’s day and Halloween. You may be able to leverage this approach in planning for your use of the game: What are the “Product Firsts” that your customers have in relation to your product and the goals that they are trying to accomplish when using your product? What are recurring rhythms that your customers must address? How does your product help or hinder their efforts? The Internet is a treasure trove of calendar-related information, and you should not have a problem finding good inspiration and supporting information for your game.

See figure 3 and figure 4.