WIZARD OF OZ | MECHANIC TURK | CONCIERGE

(tool)

Brief description

Create a customer experience and deliver value manually with people, instead of solely using technology. People doing the manual work can be visible (concierge) or hidden (wizard of oz or mechanical turk). Before making a major investment in designing and building a complex mechanism or back-end, consider using human skills to simulate the desired outcome.

Step

Prototype Improvement

Input

Solutions that can benefit from user feedback

Interaction points throughout the user experience

Output

Feedback and learnings

Refined solutions based on direct user feedback and observations

Time

Preparation, high

Execution, 5 min to 40 min

Analysis, high

Difficulty

5/5

People

8-20 (participants giving feedback)

2-5 (coordinators of the experiment

Quick Guide

Plan the steps of creating the solution manually. Understand where automating doing activities manually makes sense and where it does not.
Create a board to track all the customer requests (buying a product or a service) and the steps needed to perform the task. Also, define metrics.
Test the steps with someone internally first to make sure it works.
Receive customer requests for the experiment
Conduct the experiment.
Update your activity board with what happened in each step for each order. Document how long it took to complete the tasks.
Gather satisfaction feedback from the customers with interviews and survey.
Review your customer satisfaction feedback.

Benefits

Considers very context specific scenarios on whether you are delivering a physical or digital product or service to the end customer.
Allows you to keep the experiment small and simple so it is cheap to run (because you are doing the work manually).
Gives you firsthand knowledge of the steps needed to receive a request and deliver value to a customer; helps inform where to automate the process.
Considers working with customers that can provide suggestions and talk about possibilities (concierge).

Helpful Tips

Ideal for learning firsthand steps needed to create, capture, and deliver value to costumer.
You will need a “curtain” to hide the people performing the tasks from the customer (wizard of oz | mechanical turk).
Planning can take a longer time, that some other experiments, because you have to manually plan out all the steps and acquire customers for it.