Build Better Products. Laura Klein
A Note About Logistics
A lot of people ask where they should have these conversations—in person, on the phone, on some sort of screenshare, or something else. The answer is, “wherever you need to be in order to see patterns.”
Some products, especially mobile or physical ones, are very hard to study remotely. It’s tough to understand how people use a GPS, for example, without traveling around with them for a while. Other products, like any sort of desktop productivity software, are very easy to observe over a screenshare. Some problems can be discussed over the phone, while others can’t.
Of course, there is a cost in both time and money associated with in-person research, especially when you’re dealing with a global audience. It’s up to you to understand the tradeoff between information and research cost to find the right balance.
If you do see problem and behavior patterns in the first five people you interview, that’s great. Write them down. Then recruit another five similar people. If those patterns that you wrote down persist, there’s an excellent chance that you’ve identified a group of people who share a specific problem. If they don’t persist, keep iterating by narrowing down your persona, recruiting people, interviewing, and trying to predict what you’re going to hear. It sounds hard, but you’ll very likely start to spot patterns earlier than you think, especially if you’ve correctly identified your persona.
Why Did You Do That Exercise?
You’re going to do some form of this exercise repeatedly throughout your product’s life. Iterative interviewing and pattern spotting is one of the most important skills you can develop as a good product manager or designer. It helps you quickly develop a better understanding of your user, which will make all of your product decisions easier and better informed.
Debriefing after each session and separating problems from observations is an easy way of collecting and organizing the data you’re gathering as you go, so you’re not stuck with analyzing dozens of hours of interviews at the end of the process. This can shorten your research time dramatically.
Keeping your initial sample size small also helps you get insights from your research sooner. While you might end up interviewing dozens or even hundreds of potential users before you see strong enough problem patterns, by doing it in batches of five at a time, it allows you to quickly test whether the patterns you’re spotting are predictable.
Don’t feel like all work on your product needs to halt while you spend months on user research. Once you’re in the habit of this sort of research, talking to four or five users a week simply becomes part of your process. It’s not something that you only do at the beginning of building a product. It’s something that you’ll do throughout the life of your product. The only things you’ll change are the types of questions you ask. We’ll get into some of the different types of questions you might want to ask later in Chapters 3, “Do Better Research” and 4, “Listen Better.”
EXERCISE
The User Map
After you’ve begun to define your ideal user, you’ll find that there are several other questions that will start popping up. Things like, “Where do I find people like this?” or “What’s the most important problem I can solve for them?”
Building a User Map can help you get a more complete understanding of your users or potential users by walking you through the questions that you’ll need to answer.
The first step is to determine which user or customer you’re creating this map for. If you’re building a marketplace with buyers and sellers, or if you have an enterprise product where the person who buys the product isn’t the one using it, for example, you’ll have very different maps depending on which person you’re choosing to model. Start by creating a map for the person who is writing the check for your product: that’s your customer.
RUN THE EXERCISE: MAKING THE USER MAP
TIME TO RUN
2 hours
MATERIALS NEEDED
Sticky notes, Sharpies, whiteboard, list of User Map questions, any available user data or research
PEOPLE INVOLVED
Product managers, designers, researchers, engineers, stakeholders
EXERCISE GOAL
Get a much broader overview of your product’s users or potential users. Identify key purchasing and usage behaviors that will help you build your product.
Once you know which user you’re mapping, you’re going to want to gather the answers to all of these questions. Depending on where you are in your product cycle and how much time you’ve spent with your user, you may not be able to answer all of these questions. If you do have to skip questions, this will give you an excellent list of the research that you still need to do.
For the purposes of illustration, I’ve selected two fake products, one consumer and one enterprise. I’ll use them to give examples of the types of answers you might come up with for the questions.
• Example consumer product: A freestyle app for teens
• Example enterprise product: Multimillion dollar SaaS productivity tool for marketing teams
Determine Channels and Influencers
Before your user becomes your user, they have to hear about your product somewhere, and they might consult somebody about whether the product is right for them. The places they hear about your product are channels, and the people who might help them make decisions are influencers. For this part of the map, answer these three questions about your user.
• Where does your user learn about products like this?
Style app: School, Snapchat, Polyvore
SaaS tool: LinkedIn, Dreamforce or other large industry conferences
• What sorts of messages do they respond to?
Style app: “Be the first to get it for less!”
SaaS tool: “Get more ROI from your marketing dollars.”
• Who are their influencers or approvers for selecting and buying products like this?
Style app: Friends, Kim Kardashian, fashion bloggers, specific YouTube stars
SaaS tool: Specific industry influencers, Forbes reviews
Determine Goals and Purchase Intent
Next, you need to know why a potential user would consider your product. A person becomes a user of a product because it helps them achieve a goal or accomplish a task. You need to know what those goals are.
• What need are they trying to meet?
Style app: Be more fashionable than their friends and spend less money
SaaS tool: Understand the impact of marketing campaigns and increase return on investment
• What do they currently do to meet this need?
Style app: Read style blogs; go to sample sales and outlets
SaaS