day of your business?
If you’re talking to a current user of your product, you’d make sure to also ask whether they used anything in addition to your product, or if there were any related things that they did on a regular basis for which they couldn’t use your product.
There’s more about good interviewing techniques in the next chapter, but these are the types of open-ended, problem-finding questions that will get you a lot of useful information and help you spot patterns quickly.
The most important thing is to remember that this is your chance to listen and learn—not to sell. Selling comes later.
STEP 2: Recording and Synthesizing the Data
As you ask these questions, it’s a good idea to have somebody else on your team along for the research. It doesn’t matter who it is, and it’s always a good idea to bring different people along so that more people get exposed to the research process. Anybody who makes decisions should be involved to some extent in the research and should absolutely participate in the synthesis of the results. If you have a researcher, that person may be the one asking the questions, but product managers and designers should also participate directly in the vast majority of research sessions, if not all of them.
At the end of each research session, take 15 minutes and a stack of sticky notes. Everybody on the team who viewed the session should spend about 10 minutes writing down what they heard, one idea per sticky note.
Next, write down the answers to specific questions you asked. Try to capture problems you identified, big complaints that the participant had, and anything interesting or related that you observed.
After you’ve written down all of your observations, separate the problems from the behaviors.
An example of an interesting behavior might be something like, “The participant recorded all her cost of goods in a custom Excel spreadsheet that she updated once a week.” A problem might be, “The participant often finds discrepancies between her bank statement and what she’s recorded.”
Problems will help you find gaps in your current product or in the market for you to fill with new features. Behaviors, on the other hand, will help you understand your users better and design something that fits nicely into their lives. For example, if you find that people always use your product while commuting, that’s a behavior. It won’t necessarily help you decide exactly what product or feature to build first, but it might help you decide to focus more on mobile or to make design decisions that allow for the product to be used on the train.
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
