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What is the KA method? It is an important concept for thinking about UX, stands for user experience.  

Now let say you imagine a situation. You are in charge of products loving what you sell. It is natural for you to love your product as it has been carefully developed like your own baby. However, when you think that your products are the best, you often overlook the essence that a product is just one of the experiences for consumers.

For example, I often hear words like “Our products are 5% more productive than our competitors,” but important questions for consumers are like “How does it improve my life? What kind of experience does it bring?” They never write anything like this.

Mr. Kazumi Asada from Kibun Foods is the one that realized this. The framework he used when developing new products is called the KA method. Perhaps those who are good at reasoning may have noticed. KA stands for the initials of his name, Kazumi Asada. My name is Nozomu Kubota, so if I am the one developed, it might have been called the NK method.

Mr. Asada used 3 figures to define the essence of the experiences – Events, Voice in your mind, Underlying value.

The methods are created based on direct interviews with consumers. First, they interview the event. They ask consumers, “What was the event from your perspective?” “What kind of voice did you hear in your mind?” in order to find out what exactly happened to consumers so that interviewers can hear the real words and just write as they hear.

And the last question is, “What does that mean to you?” We will verbalize the underlying value.

The events, the voice in your mind, the underlying value. When you collect fact data of the product that has such a value, and experience, and a voice in your mind of the heart, you can have the opposite perspective. 

So you start asking questions like, “What exactly is the event to arbitrarily raise the value?” “What is the product to reproduce the voice in your mind?” It allows you to return to things like that. A series of such consumer interviews can be arranged like jigsaw puzzle pieces and collected in large quantities to complete one picture. As a result, you end up with the definition of your true value.

Author information:
Nozomu Kubota

Born in New York, the USA, he is the CEO and Founder of Creator’s NEXT, Inc. He graduated from Keio University in Japan with a degree in policy studies, and at the age of 15, he did his first programming development and built user-generated media. He has been invited to speak on digital marketing in Spain, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Luxembourg, and has won many hackathons. He won the Good Design Award, won KVeCS 2018 Grand Finale, and was invited to New York, won IE-KMD MEDIATECH VENTURE DAY TOKYO, and was invited to Spain. In 2019 and 2020, he will be selected from 37,000 people to be the best web analyst in Japan (Best of Best) for two consecutive years. He completed the Global Consumer Intelligence Endowed Chair in Global Consumer Intelligence/Matsuo Laboratory (GCI Winter 2019) at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Technology Management and Strategy. He completed the MIT Sloan & MIT CSAIL Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has a strong background in implementing scalability in global marketing and has written textbooks on marketing and A/B testing and has spoken and trained in front of over 3,000 marketers. His web analytics tool KOBIT is used by more than 8500 companies in 15 countries.