Building Products for Platforms: Platform Definition for Exchange-Driven Design

When defining a mobile solution for a traditional one-sided business, it’s typical to only account for one perspective – the end user. Its imperative that you empathize with your end user and identify their wants and needs at each stage of the design process. This multi-stage process is commonplace today when defining a product – its called User-Centered Design.

However, when dealing with platform businesses, we have to think differently about how to approach these issues for a mutli-sided business. We call this approach Exchange-Driven Design, and it’s focused on understanding the complex relationships between your users so that you can best use technology to enable the exchange of value.

Unlike traditional businesses, platforms facilitate interactions between multiple user groups – usually consumers and producers. Let’s say you have a hair salon that expands its service to provide in-home appointments. In addition to thinking about the customer, you also need to consider the perspective of the stylist (producer). Platforms require an approach that not only accounts for the needs of both user groups but also how these needs can lead to interactions that facilitate the exchange of value.

Applico’s Patrick Stewart calls this type of approach (Design Thinking)². The basic idea is that the practice of empathizing with each user group allows you to identify what each values and how these needs relate to each other. It’s these relationships that highlight where value can be exchanged, and these key exchanges will ultimately become the core of the platform.

We at Applico use this approach during the definition process with our clients. We start with an assessment of the client’s current business model by sketching each user group’s potential journey to complete an exchange. This practice directly serves to identify every step each user group must take within the platform, and it also indirectly exposes where each user group relies on the other.

Let’s take the consumer-side of our hair stylist example from above. Say that Maria is a customer who’d like to book an in-home hair appointment for this Friday at noon with her usual stylist, Sharon. We know that Maria will need to search for Sharon’s availability on Friday at noon. She may also want to see her availability before and after, in the case that she is not available at noon. Or Maria may even want to see other hair stylists, similar to Sharon, that are available at noon. Finally she’ll need to request her desired appointment.

This example is not comprehensive, but it allows you to start to see the type of functionality that Maria will need in the consumer facing app – the ability to search for appointments based on time and date, filter for hair stylist, request appointment, etc. You’ll also notice that Maria relies on Sharon to enter her schedule and accept an appointment request. Not only does this show core tasks for Sharon – entering her schedule and accepting requests – but it also exposes where information is exchanged. Maria must be able to view Sharon’s schedule and Sharon must accept an appointment request.

These journeys establish what each user needs to do and highlights where they interact to ensure that the exchange occurs.

However, it’s not enough to recognize where the interaction takes place. We also must understand the decisions within the interaction, the data exchanged and how these factors alter both user groups’ experiences. To do this we create an interaction flow that accounts for the consumer, producer and the intermediary piece that handles the exchange – the platform. Below is a sketch of the booking interaction flow that we touched on with Maria and Sharon.

Annotations

Maria has picked an appointment to book.
The consumer app checks if the user has logged in.
If not, Maria will be sent to the login flow (not pictured).
If yes, the system will check the listing to ensure it’s still available and check it’s price.
She will be asked to confirm the appointment
If she decides not to, she will be brought back to available appointments
If yes, the system will hold her spot by taking a deposit
And, the system will add the appointment to the booking request
Maria must then wait for Sharon to respond to her request
Sharon will have the opportunity to review the request
If she accepts, the system transmit an approval – updating Sharon’s availability in the process
A successful booking

You get the idea. An interaction contains any number of decisions that not only dictates the decision maker’s experience but also the recipient’s as well. There’s a crucial element at play here that’s not necessarily seen by the user, which is illustrated by the intermediary piece. Most of these decisions have an impact on how the data is manipulated and exchanged. It’s that impact that drives users’ experiences and ultimately the construction of the platform. Based on the complexity of the business, there could be any number of interaction flows, but the emphasis on user needs remains the same. These flows are essentially the basis for all future documentation and development that we do.

As you can see, Platform Innovation has required us at Applico to rethink how we approach designing and delivering our products – the result is our Exchange-Driven Design approach. What we’re building are no longer just one-sided consumer facing apps. They are products meant to power multi-sided platforms. To truly understand and define how a platform creates value, we have to understand where and what value is being exchanged, and between who.

Filed under: Platform Innovation, Product Engineering | Topics: Design, engineering, platform innovation, platforms