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 tool: Salesforce plus some plug-ins; a homegrown system for analytics and tracking
• How much time do they spend meeting this need?
Style app: 2 hours/day
SaaS tool: 2 days/week
• How much money have they spent meeting this need?
Style app: 30% of their income spent on clothes
SaaS tool: $20k/year for their SF license plus est. $200k for custom system
• Are they currently looking for a solution to meet this need?
Style app: Always looking at new things
SaaS tool: Yes, but only at the beginning of their fiscal year
• Do they have special requirements or needs for adopting the product?
Style app: Only uses mobile
SaaS tool: Needs to be certified and rolled out by IT department
Determine User/Product Fit
As you learned with personas, it’s important to be able to identify the exact behaviors and needs that determine whether a particular person will become a user of a product. Not all moms will become users of every product aimed at moms. Not all stylish teens will want to use your new style app. Not all marketing managers will buy one particular productivity product. What is it that creates the fit between the user and the product? These questions are meant to help you predict those things.
• What behaviors/needs/goals predict usage?
Style app: Shopped at a sample sale in the last 6 months and follows at least 3 fashion blogs closely
SaaS tool: Attempted to measure ROI on email marketing and content marketing investment, but felt frustrated and couldn’t get actionable information
• How does this product meet the need?
Style app: Helps them find sample sales of upcoming designers in their area
SaaS tool: Tracks email and content marketing all the way through the sales pipeline to measure actual ROI
• How does this product make the user better?
Style app: They’re the first in their group of friends to discover a trend while saving money
SaaS tool: Makes their marketing employees more efficient by generating more sales leads
Determine Context of Use
Where and with whom a person interacts with a product has a huge impact on your product and design choices. We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 7, “Design Better,” but for now, try to answer these questions about the context in which your product is being used or will be used by your customers.
• With whom will they use the product? Virtually/in-person/combo?
Style app: Alone
SaaS tool: Marketing managers; content marketers; copywriters; virtually
• Where will they use the product?
Style app: On public transit; at home
SaaS tool: In meetings; at their desks at the office; while traveling
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