How to realize a new product innovation? Should it be led by the developer and executed throughout the process, and user feedback after the launch; or should it mobilize users in the early decision-making stage of the product and continue to absorb user feedback? When product decisions will affect users, you need to incorporate their needs into the decision-making stage. Only in the needs of users can you find real innovation.
How to understand user needs
The first is to find demand in market data. Many people think that the analysis of market data requires professional tools and techniques. In fact, it does not require any complicated methods. Through the simplest data analysis, we can discover the important needs of users. For example, 360wifi, how strong is the demand for users to be able to conveniently use laptops to share wifi? Just use Baidu Know to search for “laptop sharing wifi”, you can see that there are more than 40 million (41,793,407) related questions on Know, most of which ask how to set up to share wifi. If there is a cheap, Easy-to-use equipment can help you share wifi, how can users refuse it?
Followed by user research:
- The complete collection of user usage scenarios is sorted out and sorted according to the frequency of usage, and the most frequent usage scenarios are selected
- Set tasks for users according to user usage scenarios, and according to the situation, consider allowing users to complete the same tasks with major competing products for product experience comparison
- Observe the user’s process of completing tasks, find the inconvenience in the process of using it, find the pain points of the product, watch more and ask less during the process, and let users use their usual habits to do tasks
- Ask users based on the problems found in the observations of 3, explore the pain points and potential needs in the use of their products, or ask a user any suggestions/comments for improvement, but don’t expect users to give you a solution (this is also a lot of people). One of the reasons why research is useless).
- PM proposes solutions to solve the user’s pain points and potential needs (preferably, the product team can sort out some product optimization directions before the survey), and ask users about their acceptance, reasons and suggestions for improvement.
Create product value around user needs
Most Internet products do not only have a few simple functions, but will contain dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of large and small functions. In other words, these products are expected to meet many user needs.
The composition of user needs that a product satisfies is like the solar system we are in, which is a complete system. At the center of this system is the core demand. Surrounding the core demand are its derivative demands, including a variety of basic demands, expected demands, and exciting demands.
The product generates user value by providing a series of functions to meet the various needs of users. The product functions provided by different products are different, so the product meets different user needs, and the degree of satisfaction of each need is also different, so that the value that different products can make users perceive is completely different.
After clarifying the different requirements and expectations of users for products on different needs, we can strategically select a reasonable combination of user needs, provide corresponding product functions on the product to meet these needs, and quickly improve the user value of the product. The product wins the initiative in the fierce competition.
The following briefly introduces two common and effective strategies for quickly creating product value around user needs.
Meet the core needs of users in a disruptive way
When we want to launch a new product, we must first target a user’s needs as the focus of the product’s function and the priority to be met. This demand is the core demand for the product. The core demand is at the center of the product meeting all the needs of users, and it is also the focus of users’ attention. If a new product can find a new way that is better than other products to meet the core needs of users, then the product has the opportunity to open up a new field and gain a first-mover advantage in competition.
User behavior operation slice module
How should we analyze the recorded user behavior? Ordinary intuitive observation can reveal some problems, but for the underlying psychological factors of certain specific behaviors of users, more precise analysis methods may be required. Another research method of Rococo is to slice the user’s behavior data (mainly video records) frame by frame. By analyzing the user’s subtle behavior, it can dig out the deep-seated reasons and intrinsic needs of the user’s behavior.
To sum up:
On the surface, whether a product is powerful depends on whether it has powerful functions, but in fact, the user needs that the product functions can meet are the decisive factors for the product to capture users. All in all, a good product is a game and trade-off between user needs and the designer’s ideal design.
