and iterating on the documents until you have solid evidence that they represent actual users.
Confirmation Bias
Humans are never unbiased. We all go into situations with certain beliefs that can be very hard to change.
Unfortunately, this applies when trying to do user research, and it seems to apply doubly for startup founders. When you spend every single moment of your day trying to convince people that your idea is absolute genius, taking that step back and admitting to yourself that you have things to learn can be psychologically exhausting.
Nevertheless, you need to overcome your desire to hear nothing but, “You’re right!” and “Of course I would buy this product!” Your goal during this phase is to learn new things, not just confirm what you think you already know.
In order to combat this very human tendency to hear nothing but what you want to hear, you should never conduct research alone. You’ll learn more about how to talk to users in Chapter 3, “Do Better Research,” but the best advice for now is to always take a buddy.
At the end of every research session, having another person who saw the same research you did will help you make sure that you both heard the same things. Take 15 minutes after each discussion with a user and debrief with someone whose only job it was to observe. Or, if you’re having a very hard time being neutral, let another person lead the interviews while you grit your teeth and keep your mouth shut. You’ll get much better results.
Jumping to Solutions
Once you start seeing problem patterns, you’re going to want to solve those problems. It’s natural. You see something that is causing pain to somebody, and your instinct will be to try to fix it. You’re not a monster.
Sadly, you’ll have to suppress that desire to fix things for longer than you might like. This phase of the project, while it doesn’t have to take very long, does have to be entirely focused on identifying and validating problems rather than generating solutions.
I know it’s tempting to solve the first problem you see, but don’t jump to the solution space just yet. You’ll find that people can have endless problems, and you’re never going to be able to solve all of them. As the person in charge of making product decisions, you’re going to have to prioritize, and sometimes that means seeing people struggle with something and deciding not to solve it just yet. Besides, we don’t get to prioritization until Chapter 6, “Prioritize Better.”
EXPERT ADVICE from Cindy Alvarez
Understanding your user is critical to success, and few people know more about learning who your customer really is than Cindy Alvarez, Director of UX at Yammer—a Microsoft Company. She shared advice on the mistakes that teams make about their users and how to avoid them.
“Teams often misunderstand their customers in one of two ways,” Cindy explained. “Some, especially those who set out to solve their own problem, substitute their own opinions and wants and needs for those of the customer. The other problem is when teams listen to the most vocal customers’ unsolicited feedback. In both cases, this leads to a skewed view of what customers truly value.” To avoid those traps, you need to focus on the right customers and the right questions.
What You Need to Know About Your Customer
According to Cindy, there are two questions that teams need to answer about their customers:
• Who is getting the most value from our product?
• How can we learn more about what they need so that we can retain and monetize them and acquire more customers like them?
To answer these questions, Cindy recommends a three-step process that combines both quantitative and qualitative methods.
STEP 1: Find Your Heaviest Users
If you have the data, start looking for customers who are using the product constantly. These are your power users.
Who is on the platform every day? Who is contributing most? Who is configuring the most reports? Who is sending the most messages? Who is coming back two, three, or four times more often than average? Whatever it is your product does, you’re looking for the people who are doing it the most.
STEP 2: Ask a Single Question
Next, use email, text, or a lightweight, in-product chat service like Qualaroo or Olark to send a single question to your biggest users. That question should be something like “Does ProductName make your life easier/better?” Give them the options, “Extremely, Yes, or Not Really.”
Make sure it’s really just one question and that the answers are multiple choice and clear. This is not the time to start throwing in all the extra questions that marketing wants or adding “just one more as long as we’re surveying people.” You’re not really conducting a survey. You’re taking the temperature of your audience. You want to make this quick interaction as simple and painless as possible, because the question itself is not the end goal of this exercise.
STEP 3: Follow Up with Interviews
Now that you have the answer to your quick question, you need to follow up with qualitative interviews of as many of the people who answered “Extremely” as you can. Do whatever it is you need to do to get them on the phone or to meet them in person. The question was merely a screening device to find people who feel like your product provides a huge benefit to them. This is where you’ll really start learning.
Your goal in these interviews is to understand why your product is making their lives easier. Learn what they’re trying to do, and figure out what challenges they still face. These are your ideal, current user, and you need to truly understand the value you’re delivering to them in order to develop some ideas for how you could do better.
But don’t stop there. You also want to talk to some of the folks who are using your product but don’t feel it makes their lives easier. These are the people who answered “No” to your question, but for some reason continue to use your product.
As Cindy says, “A customer who uses your product daily but hates it is a customer who is open to switching to another solution.” These are likely folks who are forced by circumstances to use your product, but they’re not happy about it. It’s valuable to understand why your product isn’t making their lives easier. If you’re not providing them much value, you may consider killing or shifting focus away from the parts of your product that they use.
Most importantly, you need to understand the differences between the people who are happy, successful users of your product and those who are unhappy or not deriving much value from it. This is the difference between your ideal customer and somebody who is only with you until something better comes along.
What to Do When You Don’t Have
