This exercise highlights the relevance of understanding the customer’s thought process when they make a buying decision.

More specifically, it will help your students:

• Understand the importance of talking to customers before creating a product
• Gain confidence in speaking with customers
• Understand customer pain points by ‘walking in their shoes’
• Gain insights and new ideas from seeing things from the customer’s perspective.

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“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
– Atticus Finch – To Kill a Mockingbird

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Students are placed in a situation that allows them to complete a ‘walk-a-mile’ immersion in a 50-minute time frame.

The complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s a quick overview.

Step 1: The Set Up

You will want to review Best Practices for Restaurant Website which are provided in the lesson plan. BJ Restaurant is an example that fulfills the requirements of a good site.

Step 2: Class-time

This class starts with students brainstorming, as a customer, what they would want from a restaurant website.

You can help students brainstorm ideas by asking: “what info did you look up the last time before you went to a restaurant?”

You can also suggest different scenarios, such as going alone, with friends, for dinner, for work, etc.

The goal is for students to ‘put themselves’ in a customer’s shoes. To gain an understanding of a customer’s needs and wants.

Step 3: Break out session

You will have students form teams, and give them 15 minutes to evaluate their favorite restaurant’s website, to see if it meets their list of requirements. Teams should also be on the lookout for particularly bad websites, which they will present in the next step.

China Garden – Example of a bad website.

Step 4: Debrief

After the teams had time to review websites, have each group present the worst website they found and discuss why they feel it was not a good website.

Questions to address after each team presents can include:

1. How did they arrive at this decision?
2. How did they feel when the website didn’t fulfill their requirements?
3. How does a website that fulfilled their requirements improve their experience?
4. How did they feel this exercise helped them connect with customers?

See the complete lesson plan below for more ideas and topics to cover.

Results

When I run this in class, students have an a-ha moment when realizing how a better website, a website they would use, is created when you understand the customer. By making themselves the customer, they see how they wouldn’t use a poorly built site and how it would affect their impression of the restaurant.

Students will realize the benefits of talking to customers before creating a product or business because they have discovered the importance of understanding the customer’s perspective and thought process surrounding the buying decision.

By having students go through this exercise early in the course schedule, you can draw on their experiences when they are developing ideas, and be planning out their customer development work.

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This article is a collaboration with Naema Baskanderi, UX Lead & Researcher, and UX Instructor. The goal of this exercise is for students to understand a critical component of creating a product or business that fulfills a customer’s needs.

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Get the “Walk A Mile” Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Walk A Mile” exercise to walk you, and your students, through the process, step-by-step.

Click here for the lesson plan L 

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.

 

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Last Call for the Teaching Entrepreneurship Digital Conference!

If you want to learn and practice exercises to better engage your students and learn how to assess experiential learning,  join us this Thursday May 10th. Jim Hart, Julienne Shields, and our very own Justin Wilcox will use our unique digital conference format to guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises they introduce to:

• Enable your students to work on big ideas
• Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
• Help your students with problem validation.

At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!

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