Importance of User Research for Early Stage B2C Product Success

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Intro

The topic of User Experience Research in the realm of User Experience Design has captured a lot of attention recently. User Experience Research or User Research focuses on understanding a user or customer view of using a service/product or a experiencing a situation in order to better design/craft compelling experiences for them. It is systematically organizing and obtaining feedback through a variety of methods from actual users of the Product besides alpha and beta testers. However, the same can also be used to explore opportunities or understand problems better. In fact, having an effective, well-managed and systematic User Research can prove to be critical to the success of a Product irrespective of its stage. Toyota, the automotive giant, send its research team physically to market locations to conduct field studies, observe consumers in real life, using their products or competitor products, and identify opportunities i.e. understand pain points and aspirations. This article will focus on my thoughts on User Research for early-stage Products that have not attained market-fit i.e. do not have a customer base at all.

Importance of User Research

Anyone developing new products would have experienced the painful consequences of under-investing in understanding the actual needs of the user. Without having at least the pseudo user at hand to provide inputs numerous assumptions have to made about the user requirements, for both the consumer and the business in case of a B2C/retail/virtual communities. Not only does making the assumptions end with the needs, it will continue to proliferate all aspects of the Product Development from Ideation, UI/UX Design, Validation, Testing and Marketing. The longer a product takes to get to launch and experience market validation the harder it gets to guess the correct requirements since the actual customer never gets to experience the product and provide real validation hence more assumptions continue to be made. With so much unknown going into the Product it becomes a nightmare when the product is launched and requires significant changes once launched into the market.

Numerous thinkers in new IT/software product development have put proposed understanding customer needs much early before launching a product through Customer Discovery and Development frameworks that focus on identifying early adopters [1]. Others ideas are continuous feedback loop from potential customers [2]. Recruiting or identifying these early users will not only serve in developing a product that will actually solve a real problem (or quickly identify the absence of it) but also will create product evangelists that will readily help spread the word to other potential early adopters. Identifying the right demographics and personal traits, circumstances and motivations will make it much easier for marketing teams to target the right customers come launch day [3].

None of the ideas such as Design Thinking, Lean Canvas, Lean Startup or Iterative and Incremental Releases, Agile teams, Automated Testing, CI/CD, DevOps will be fruitful to achieve market-fit unless the needs are understood and product ideas validated with actual potential customers; forget launching prototypes and MVPs. Of course, if the market is well-defined and the Product is an incremental iteration to existing products extensive marketing with additional benefits may just be sufficient to attract customers. But if the Products aim to be disruptive for both consumers (who usually have big expectations and tight budgets) and businesses, it is wise to focus on the fundamentals such as Customer and Market Research to understand needs or identify opportunities from the actual users

Why teams choose to ignore user research

So, if this is so important, why do Product teams not focus on understanding the User
Unless the team building early stage Products has strong successful Product Experience within the same domain (B2B /B2C) there is no one to emphasize this step i.e. lack of experience

Most IT services companies have customers that tell them the requirements. Hence, there are no internal teams specifically with capabilities to identify customer needs using proper research techniques
There is a false understanding that building an MVP means building some form of a Product quickly, launching it to market and only then understanding the need
Using rudimentary or pseudo user research methods might be deemed sufficient.

However, user Research is a hard science that needs to be mastered in order to carefully ascertain the problem while separating the bias.
So, what happens if Product Teams are unable/unwilling to invest their time and resources in understanding real customer needs or on-board early adopters that will serve to refine Product Ideas and the overall user experience?

The highest paid person will have the luxury to make the most number of assumptions or unfortunately will have the most credit for the demise of the product due to critical assumptions that were never validated early due to lack of early adopters

There will be excessive focus on the product/service’s marketing aspects such as beauty considerations of the user interface (UI), which might serve well for established products but of little value for early stage products. Too much time and money will be spent on crafting that perfect user interface i.e. ideation, designing, developing, testing.

The product is no longer be minimum viable (MVP) since it will surely have unwanted features developed purely on assumptions

Confirmation bias will wreck havoc with product ideas. The team will only pick choices that confirm their existing beliefs and will not explore alternatives that will challenge their assumptions due to the lack of an actual user who can call a spade a spade i.e. provide unbiased feedback [6]

By the time this expertly assumed, greatly designed and thoroughly tested product is launched into the market with big fanfare, the product looking great on surface will have little substance for the actual customers since it will be far away from their expectations.

How to conduct User Research

So, how does a product team understand actual user needs and enlist potential users for continuous feedback? Although software and service companies may not have budgets of multinational corporations below are some ideas to get started based on my reading

Steps in User Research

Select the assumption to test

Create user personas and identify traits

Select the appropriate research technique [4]

Reach out to the crowd

Weed out irrelevant profiles and Select Participants

Conduct Research and Compensate Participants

Analyze Results

How to obtain participants

Run initial campaigns on Facebook and Twitter to identify interested users. Create a landing page with the idea/concept so that those interested (or experienced the most-pain which the new product will solve) can sign-up for email updates.

Google Ventures recommends creating a screener, advertise and attract responses either on our own (posting to social media) or using the services of a Recruiting Vendor, and screen for ideal candidate [5]

Do not rely on friends, family and colleagues since their feedback will be biased or mostly favorable compared to an actual user

Although User Research is a vast field on it’s own, getting started early will make it much easy for product teams to find and solve the right problem while returning a tenfold value on investment.