Good product designers must learn to “consult with the majority, listen to the opinions of a few, and make their own decisions.” But I want to extend it to the outside of the product, to the users of the product, because your product is for people to use, not for product people’s self-entertainment, so, “Explore most users’ Needs, listen to the opinions of a few users, and make your own decisions” is a basic method for users to help you make a product. Because I have been in contact with some of the work of user research recently, I also personally collect feedback from competing users, so I have some caution in this regard, and I hope to share with you.
How to let users help us make products? Let me first briefly introduce some basic concepts:
- High-end users: the trendy players active in the industry
- Target users: potential users at the beginning of product design
- Typical users: very clear target users
- Similar users: users of the same or similar products
- Real users: users who are actually using the product
- Leading users: more forward-looking users, their needs represent the future universal needs
- Early adopters: like to try new things and have no clear needs
- Core users: users who have strong loyalty to the product
1. High-end users are sometimes leading users
Sometimes we put too much emphasis on not being misled by high-end users, thinking that the needs of high-end users will deviate from the needs of real users. In fact, high-end users are often lead users, and their needs are sometimes forward-looking. Need to go to real users to verify, there may be a different breakthrough point. But avoid early adopters, because they just like new things, they have a strong tolerance, like to try all kinds of things that may be helpful to them, but they are not sure what they need. For example, I recently went to a product forum to watch and found that the needs of their real users were actually the needs of high-end users that I imagined before, and the voices were very high. It is not difficult to believe that the hardware equipment is gaining 18%. The rate of updating once a month is developing rapidly. Today, Symbian users may still have obstacles in posting pictures. After 18 months, maybe a thousand yuan machine will send a live video without much problem.
2. There must be target users at the beginning of product design
At the beginning of product design, it is often necessary to define a persona. The persona can be regarded as an abstraction from our typical users, but the persona must not be drawn by imagination, but by talking to real users. Learn about their true preferences, personalities, etc. And when we don’t have a clear typical user, we must first draw up the target user, find some live targets according to the target user, and conduct an ethnography research or user log. Ethnographic research requires staying with users and observing their related activities using similar products, as well as some other daily activities, a bit like field research. The user log can last for a week or longer, usually allowing users to record their activities, feelings and expectations every day or every few hours. The product team often regards its own needs as the needs of users. At the beginning of the design, the target users are defined and the personas are drawn to avoid such mistakes.
3. Spy on real users and similar users at all times
After the product is launched, you can collect user feedback by setting up some online forums, circles, and QQ groups, and accumulate users’ active participation in the project through some operational activities, reward points exchange and other activities, and put forward their opinions or suggestions. , Through this way of user collaboration, basically you can get very timely and free feedback. And, don’t forget that your competitors also have similar feedback forums and groups. You might as well lurking in as an undercover user to see how users respond to competing products and what you need to learn from. Of course, in the micro era, an official Weibo is also indispensable. The official Weibo can be your channel for information release and collection, where you can always follow the feedback of Weibo users through keywords, and reply in time to answer questions. Will give you a very good corporate image.
4. Obtain improvement opinions from real users
Real users are your greatest wealth. You can intuitively infer their usage and demand from their usage data. Of course, you need to have a very strong data interpretation ability. You can also ask real users to come over for usability testing to find experience problems in the product. However, the best quantitative data analysis and qualitative user testing can verify each other. For example, the data feedback that the user verifies the mobile phone number before the purchase has a large loss rate. During the usability test, it is found that the user is verifying the mobile phone number. I don’t know that I need to click to send the verification code, so the process is stuck and cannot continue. Then you can know that the design here is problematic.
5. From core users to special users
Once a product is released to the outside world, it must be tempered in a natural ecosystem, and the recommendation of core users will make the product form a virtuous circle. It is better to find some special users from the core users, and give them an experience every time the internal beta version has not been released to the outside world, listen to their opinions humbly, and encourage them to show off their priority use of the product on various occasions. There cannot be too many special users, and too many will lose the sense of honor; and the special user requirements are the potential target users of the product, and they must not be early adopters. If you don’t have a few special users on hand, go and recruit as soon as possible. This is what I learned in the “Revelation”, see Chapter 15.
6. Classification of user needs
There is a saying in the book “InnovationX”, “User needs can be roughly divided into functional requirements and experience requirements, but in addition to that, you can also analyze user needs from other aspects: Has the existing product been met or not? Is the demand clearly stated by the user or is it hidden behind a lot of appearances and information? These aspects can be used to classify the demand into a 2-by-2 matrix.”
For version upgrades, the most important and urgent thing is to give priority to solving unmet needs within expectations; for new products, if competitors do not solve unmet needs within expectations, then you provide such services, indeed It solves the user’s pain point problem, and there will be more optimistic room for improvement. If the competitor is likely to quickly solve the unmet needs within the expectations, but it takes a lot of time for you to solve the unmet needs within the expectations, then do so There may be some gains and losses. You may wish to consider the unresolved demand outside your expectations, and this demand is a real potential core demand.
Finally, our goal is to create valuable, feasible, and usable products, hoping to stand on the user’s standpoint and use the power of users to help us achieve this goal.
