How can users help you complete product design?

Good product designers should learn to "discuss with the majority of people, listen to the opinions of a few people, and make their own decisions". This sentence comes from Baidu's Analects of Confucius, which is a basic way for the product team to make internal decisions. But I want to extend it to the external products and the users of the products, because your products are for people rather than for their own entertainment, "mining the needs of most users, listening to the opinions of a few users, and making decisions by yourself" is a basic method for users to help you develop products. Recently, I have been engaged in some research work, and I am collecting feedback from competing product users myself. So I have to be careful about this and hope to share it with you.

How can users help us develop products? Here I will introduce some basic concepts:

◆ High-end users: active in the forefront of the industry

◆ Target users: potential users proposed at the beginning of Product Design

◆ Typical users: very specific target users

◆ Similar users: Users of similar or similar products

◆ Real users: users who are actually using the product

◆ Pilot users: prospective users whose needs represent the universal needs of the future

◆ Early adopters: users who like to try new things have no clear requirements

◆ Core users: users with strong product loyalty

I,High-end users are sometimes preemptible users.

Sometimes we emphasize too much that we should not be misled by high-end users, and think that the demand of high-end users will deviate from the demand of real users. In fact, high-end users are usually lead users ), their needs are sometimes forward-looking and can be verified by real users based on their needs. There may be different breakthroughs. But we need to avoid early adopters, because they only like new things, they have a strong tolerance ability, they like to try a variety of things that may be helpful to themselves, but they are not sure what they need. For example, I recently went to a product forum to look around and found that the demand raised by their real users was actually the demand of high-end users I previously imagined, it is not hard to believe that hardware devices are upgrading every 18 months at a rapid speed. Today, Symbian users may still have obstacles to sending images, after 18 months, it may be okay to broadcast live videos on a mega machine.

II,Target users are required at the beginning of product design.

At the beginning of product design, we often need to define Persona. character roles can be extracted from typical users, but character roles cannot be drawn by imagination, instead, you need to talk to real users to learn their true preferences and personalities. When there are no clear typical users, we need to first draw up the target users, and find some targets for the target users to carry out the research (ethnography research) or user logs. The study of human species requires users to stay with them and observe their activities related to using similar products, as well as some other daily activities, a bit like field studies. User logs can last for a week or longer. Generally, users can record their activities, feelings, and expectations every day or every few hours. The product team tries to regard their needs as user needs. The design defines the target user and draws the role to avoid such errors.

III,Always snoop on real users and similar users

After the product is launched, you can create online forums, circles, and QQ groups to collect user feedback, it also relies on activities such as operation activities and bonus points to accumulate the user's active participation in the project, and puts forward their opinions or suggestions. Through such user collaboration, basically, you can get very timely and free feedback. Also, don't forget that your competitors have similar feedback forums and groups. You may wish to lurk in as an undercover user to see how the user gives feedback on competing products, which of the following are the areas for reference. Of course, in the micro-era, an official microblog is also essential. official Weibo can be a channel for your information release and collection. Where can I always pay attention to feedback from Weibo users through keywords, and timely reply, Q & A, will establish a very good corporate image for you.

IV,Get improvement suggestions from real users

Real users are your greatest fortune. You can use data to intuitively predict their usage and needs. Of course, you need a strong data interpretation capability. You can also ask real users to test availability to find out the experience problems in the product. However, it is best to perform quantitative data analysis and qualitative user tests to verify each other. For example, the data feedback shows that the loss rate of mobile phone numbers verified before purchase is large, while the availability test, if the user does not know the mobile phone number verification step and needs to click the verification code, the process gets stuck and cannot continue. The design here is problematic.

V,From core users to special users

Once a product is released, it must be honed in a natural ecosystem. The recommendation of core users will create a virtuous circle for the product. It is better to find some special users from the core users. Each time they have not released an internal beta version, they can experience it and humbly listen to their opinions, they are encouraged to show off their preferred right to use the product on various occasions. There cannot be too many special users, so they lose their sense of honor. In addition, special users must be potential target users of the product and must not be early adopters. If you do not have a few special users, please recruit them. This is what I learned in Revelation. See chapter 15th.

VI,User requirement Classification

"InnovationX" is a good example. "user needs can be divided into functional requirements and experience requirements, however, you can also analyze the user's requirements from other aspects: have the requirements been met or not met in the existing products? Is the requirement clearly stated by the user or hidden behind many appearances and information? With these aspects, we can classify the requirements into a 2-by-2 matrix"

For version upgrades, the most important and urgent thing is to give priority to the desired requirements. For new products, if competitors want to meet the requirements that are not met, then, you provide such services to solve the pain points of users, and there will be a relatively optimistic room for growth. If the competitors may quickly solve the unfulfilled needs in the expectation, however, it takes a lot of time for you to solve the expected demand, and this may be a little less than worth the loss. You may wish to consider the unresolved demands beyond the expectation of a war, this demand is indeed a real potential core demand.

Finally, our goal is to create valuable, feasible, and available products. We hope to help us achieve this goal from the standpoint of users.