The Mechanical Turk Method

Definition:

Use human skills to simulate your product or service idea & determine if anyone will use it.

Example:

Before taking the time and money to build an intricate piece of chatbot technology, why not simulate the experience using human skills first! Set up a series of FAQs and generic answers to them, and see if people utilise the "chatbot" help option on your site.

Depending on the data, you can also then test other aspects of the experience, for example:

• What kind of questions are people asking?

• How customised does it need to be to keep customers happy?

Resources:

Rapidly: helps you work out which ideas you should invest in, by tracking your experiments and using data to tell you what will work.

Wondering how to implement a Mechanical Turk? These things can help:

• Text messaging/messaging apps;

• Spreadsheets;

• Call centre/white label phone, and,

• Hiring or renting equipment/services rather than building them first.