In the previous updates in “Product Journey”, I made a prototype with TinkerCad. It’s time to have a conversation with my target user now.

My product is a wall-mounted guitar hanger with 5 hooks that send an alert if you don’t’ put guitars back on the hook when you leave your room. In other words, it tells you “you haven’t cleaned up yet, do it now!”. That’s why I was afraid that my idea might make my husband uncomfortable and I needed to start with good conversation. So I asked questions about his music works, his bands, live shows, good environments for the music, then talked about his guitars and other equipment, which provided deep insights about his attitudes toward music and will help me to move forward to the next steps. Finally, I got down to the main topic; how to organize guitars. I asked why he leaves guitars on the couch or desk often, how he organizes them currently, what he has done to improve the situations, what kind of tools he has used so far to organize guitars, how he feels when he sees unorganized equipment, what kind of environment he can be more creative when he makes songs, etc. As I realized in advance, his problems are not real problems, they are more like inconvenience things or issues that should be fixed. Additionally, they are more MY issues, not him because he is kind of okay with being surrounded by guitars while I cannot stand the mess in his room.

I elaborated on the issues I’m willing to solve for him and showed my design. He likes the part he can hang up more guitars on the wall, however, he doesn’t like to put guitars facing to the side with 2 reasons. First, he wants to see the guitar faces completely from the front. Showing only the side part of the guitars doesn’t look cool for him. Second, hanging up guitars facing to the side takes space about 20 inches from the wall, which would make him feel squeezed in his small room.

Guitars facing to the side

He doesn’t like this style; guitars facing to the side

Guitars facing front

He prefers to display guitars with this style

Additionally, he told me that he was planning to buy new guitars soon and 5 hooks weren’t enough… More guitars??? (I said this loudly only in my mind because I had to continue interviewing.) He likes the concept to play his favorite songs for the alert function, which was what I didn’t expect. He would appreciate that he can get an encouragement to organize guitars with music and he can avoid being yelled at by me. He also told me that he has issues to organize other equipment such as guitar effectors, microphones, and tons of extension codes and cables.

Guitar Effector board

So many effector units… besides those in the picture, there were more… 

cables

So many cables…. although I can see he tries to organize them

OMG! He has so many types of equipment that I’ve never seen before. He was very happy to explain what kind of effect each effector unit can generate. There were more effectors in his bag! Cables are a nightmare here. They look all the same with black long codes. Even he is not sure which is which. It turned out there was more equipment that needs to be organized better; bigger issues!!!

He wishes he can organize all of them with guitar display racks in one big shelf. He was not able to find that kind of product in the market. He believes that the best solution for this issue is moving to a bigger place and be patient until then… Although he has one shelf that filled with the guitar boxes in his room, he told me he could put those boxes on his storage because he uses box only when he travels. Thus, conversations with him gave me clues for the next steps.