because they probably should be represented by different personas.
So what do you do when you find out that none of the people you recruited want your product? You iterate on your persona or your product. Because you’re either wrong about what makes a person use your product, or you’re wrong about what your potential users will buy. You have to change one or the other, and you have to keep doing it until you can prove conclusively that your persona isn’t just descriptive of your users, but also predictive of the type of person who will become a user.
Next Steps
Now that you have your personas, and you’re pretty sure that they’re predictive, you’re ready for the next step—getting out of the building and starting to observe and listen to real humans.
So far, we’ve been mostly talking with team members and stakeholders, because we’ve been very focused on the internal needs and expectations of your company. It’s time to start talking to real users, or, if you’re building a brand new product, potential users.
One of the most important things that the personas can do is to give you somewhere to start with your research. You should constantly be going back to your personas and updating them as you learn new things and build an understanding of the people who are going to buy your product.
But first, you have to find some people and talk to them.
EXERCISE
Identifying Problem Patterns
Once you have an idea of the user whose behavior you want to change, it’s time to learn a few things about that person. The exact things you want to learn will, of course, vary based on the behavior that you want to change, but one very useful approach is to search for problem patterns.
A problem pattern is simply an important, predictable problem that is shared across a large percentage of your market. It’s useful to identify problem patterns because it allows you to be more confident that your market is, in fact, a single market where everyone might want to buy your solution to their problem.
RUN THE EXERCISE: IDENTIFYING PROBLEM PATTERNS
TIME TO RUN
Several hours over multiple days
MATERIALS NEEDED
Video camera for recording sessions (optional), sticky notes, Sharpies, whiteboard
PEOPLE INVOLVED
Product managers, designers, researchers, engineers
EXERCISE GOAL
Gather and synthesize user research to develop a better understanding of your product’s users.
When we spoke with eBay sellers for the financial product I mentioned earlier, we saw several problem patterns around things like tracking cost of goods and inventory management. These were problem patterns that we specifically did not see among consultants who sold their time rather than physical products.
PRO TIP
I often get asked, “How many people do I need to interview before I’ll know the answer to the question I’m asking?” The answer is “Five. And then another five. Until you start to be able to predict what you’re going to hear.”
This is less of an exercise and more of a way of life for a user-centered product manager or designer. Expect to do a lot of this.
STEP 1: Iterative Interviewing
The first step is to recruit some folks who fit the provisional persona that you created. Your goal is to find people who match most of the criteria in the demographic and behavior sections of the persona document. So, if you decided that the person most likely to have the problems that your product will solve is a single, left-handed dentist in Boise, Idaho, who owns her own dental practice, has a problem finding good dental equipment designed for lefties, and loves her iPhone, then you’re going to start looking for people who match that description as closely as possible.
This also applies if you’re talking to real users of your product. Depending on the persona you’ve created, you may only want to talk to administrators or people who have used your product for more than a year, or users who have accessed a specific feature in the last three weeks. You shouldn’t interview just anybody who uses your product. You need to focus on the type of person whose behavior you’re planning to change with a new feature or fix.
Whatever the screening criteria is, you want to find five of these folks who will talk to you for between 30 and 60 minutes as soon as you can get them scheduled. There are lots of techniques for making sure that you get good research participants. I’m not going to go into them in detail here.
PRO TIP
Sometimes finding people for research can be challenging, especially for new products that don’t have users yet. On the other hand, at some point you’re going to have to find hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people who want to buy your product. If you can’t find five who will talk to you for 30 minutes about it, maybe it’s not a great market for you.
Once you find five people in your target persona to talk to you, you’re not going to talk about just anything, and you’re certainly not going to ask them what they’d like you to build. Instead, you’re going talk to them about their problems, behaviors, needs, and goals.
If you’ve already got a product with users, your specific questions and methodology will be a bit different than if you’re working on something entirely new, but the target is the same. You’re looking for patterns by asking about problems and how they’ve attempted to solve the problems in the past. You’re trying to find out what goals they’re trying to reach and how they’ve been prevented from reaching them in the past.
As an example, let’s look at the type of questions you might ask eBay sellers who are trying to track their sales. These are not the only possible questions, but it’s a good selection of the type you’ll want to ask.
Sample questions:
• Tell me about your business on eBay.
• How do you currently keep track of your business?
• How do you know how much money you’re making? How about how much you’re spending?
• Have you had any problems or issues with this system? If so, what?
• How did you decide to track things this way?
• Have you used any other systems to track this sort of thing in the past? If so, how did they work for you? Why did you stop using them?
