Hello INNOVATEwest Community,
If you want to beat the competition in the long-term, you can’t just solve a customer’s problem—you have to deliver an intuitive customer experience that delights as much as it helps. This is the mindset Jessica Yip, Co-Founder and COO of A&K Robotics, brings to her work. Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Jessica explained more about how she approaches building lasting technology products.
Key takeaways:
- Don’t just design to solve a problem; design to create a holistic customer experience.
- Build to click into existing customer workflows and make it intuitive to how your customer currently works.
- Think about how to deliver additional benefits customers either weren’t expecting or want, but can’t achieve without new technology.
Dave Tyldesley
Co-Founder/Producer SAAS NORTH & INNOVATEwest
Editor INNOVATEwest PULSE
Drowning in data silos? Workflows bogged down? Boomi’s your integration life raft. Unify your fragmented landscape, unleash data flow, and unlock innovation. Get your free “Chaos to Order” eBook and tame the tech storm. It’s time to thrive, not survive.
Advertisement
The technology adage of building “painkillers” versus “vitamins” might be helpful for finding initial features to build or validating your startup idea. But if you want to build a truly impactful business, Jessica Yip, Co-Founder and COO of A&K Robotics, said you need to go well beyond function.
Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Jessica explained more about what it means to build for a comprehensive and intuitive customer experience.
Start with holistic problem solving for the end user
The primary challenge A&K Robotics aims to solve—the “painkiller”—is helping people with mobility difficulties navigate airports, specifically getting from security to their gate safely and on-time. Right now, that’s done entirely by humans pushing wheelchairs or driving golf carts. But Jessica said airport employees are overwhelmed as-is and, in many cases, passengers don’t want or need this level of care, which creates an opportunity for innovation.
Glean searches across all your company’s apps to help you find exactly what you need and discover the things you should know. Its powerful unified search understands who you are, to instantly deliver highly personalized results.
When people go to an airport, most take a meandering path from security to their gate. Perhaps they go shopping a bit at Duty Free, get a coffee, or sit in more comfortable chairs. They may also go to a lounge, if they have access or airline status. Jessica said it’s this full scope that she’s focused on—while individuals have one core challenge that must be solved in an airport (getting to the gate), there are many additional, smaller parts that create a full experience.
A holistic mindset to problem solving helped inform A&K’s solution. It’s not meant to replace wheelchairs, but offer an alternative self-driving method for passengers who want a new type of experience.
“What we’ve developed is this mobility pod, where it can take travelers anywhere in the airport, but also do it in a way where they feel that they can do it easily with ease and independence,” said Jessica. “So they don’t have to rely on a worker or rely on asking others for help to get where they need to go.”
That idea of independence and the full experience is crucial for success, said Jessica. True adoption doesn’t just come from technology begrudgingly solving a problem while delivering myriad inconveniences elsewhere; you fall in love with technology when it delivers a solution and a great experience.
Find out why Northern Ireland is a great place for your business expansion overseas.
Build to empower existing workflows for all stakeholders
Most technologies, whether software or hardware, have multiple stakeholders involved. In A&K Robotics’ airport use case, passengers are end users but airport employees are key stakeholders. That means the product must also account for employee needs, wants, and limitations. The two keys Jessica discovered through user research are not demanding more resources for use and being conscious of building technology that’s easy for non-technical people to use.
The first key is relatively easily dealt with; as a self-driving robot, it extends mobility capacity but does not require additional employees to operate. The second requires significant thought and attention to bring complex robotics down to a simple user level.
“I’ve seen some technologies get deployed … that you can’t necessarily hand off to the everyday worker and expect them to use it in a half day,” said Jessica. “They need a substantial amount of training.”
On top of learning the specific technology, Jessica also said she wanted to ensure anything A&K Robotics built would fit into airline employees’ existing work style rather than asking them to change.
“Once you start doing [asking people to change their workflow to adopt your technology], you start affecting that broad market adoption intention that we need in order to commercialize as quickly as possible,” said Jessica.
QAI INNOVATEwest Newsletter Graphic – The Quantum Algorithms Institute is your trusted source for stepping into the quantum future. We make the adoption of quantum technologies accessible, tangible, and collaborative for everyone.
Do your homework so the customer doesn’t have to
Building a comprehensive technology product means “doing the homework” necessary to identify and solve the side effects your painkiller might cause. For example, a self-driving robot frees up a human resource to focus on passengers with additional needs… but it creates the problem where mobility devices can get lost since no human is manually pushing it. In this case, a tracking app solves the side effect.
But beyond solving for side effects, Jessica said you should think about how you can open up new opportunities—whether those are things customers always wanted to do, but couldn’t, or things they didn’t know were possible.
One example with A&K’s platform, said Jessica, is to build a dashboard that tracks common routes and issues that passengers report with the pods. This information is traditionally manually collected via employee memory, but it’s not collated and easily forgotten. By giving airport executives a view into the data, they can make more informed decisions about mobility throughout the whole airport for all passengers.
“As founders, we should take on that homework so that the customer doesn’t have to,” said Jessica. “The end user of your technology should be able to immediately benefit and recognize value. Those are a lot of things that go beyond just the pure function of whatever technology you’re using.”
The #1 event app on the market. Easy to use event app and management platform that you, your attendees and sponsors love. AI built in. Give your attendees and sponsors the digital experience they want.
STAY IN THE LOOP