Validating Product Ideas. Tomer Sharon
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and opinions. Interviewing people whom you assume to be your target audience (and those you think are not) is a great way to get to know your users, segment them, design for them, solve their problems, and provide value. An interview can be held in person (highly recommended and preferred, you’ll learn so much more) or remotely over a phone or some kind of a video conference (second best, you’ll get your answers but won’t learn enough).
Meet Anna, a 37-year-old soccer mom who lives in Fairlawn, New Jersey. Anna is a producer at CNBC in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. She has two kids (ages 3 and 8), is married to Bob, an analyst in a brokerage firm in New York City, and has an income of $115,000 per year. Anna’s biggest challenge related to grocery shopping is that she’s struggling to come up with a variety of dishes that are both healthy and desirable for her kids. She also finds herself spending a lot of time at the store dealing with her kids’ behavior rather than focusing on getting what she needs quickly. And she always is looking for great deals that will save her money. She would love to get more organized with her grocery shopping and cooking and find someone to occupy her kids and prevent tantrums while at the grocery store.
Makes sense, right? Looks like the beginning of a useful persona, doesn’t it? If we had just a few more of these, we could be well on our way to tailoring a kick-ass app for grocery shopping.
Well, everything you just read about Anna is false. I jotted it down in five minutes, and it is all based on my guesses and assumptions gathered through my own grocery shopping experiences (at least ones I can remember) and of my wife’s.
A word about personas. A persona is a description of an archetypical user of a product. It’s a communication tool that helps align development (and other) teams with different types of users. Personas are a great way to create a common language about users and raise empathy toward them within an organization. Unlike what many people think, personas are not a research methodology. The biggest problem with personas is that, in many cases, they are not based on research but on assumptions, guesses, and beliefs. It’s perfectly fine to start with an assumption and then validate or invalidate it, yet creating a persona based on guesses and then trusting it without any research behind it is just wrong.
These non-research-based personas were given names such as assumptive or ad-hoc personas (coined by Tamara Adlin), provisional personas (coined by Kim Goodwin), or proto-personas (coined by Jeff Gothelf). If there’s no research behind a persona, I prefer a more direct name for it. I like to call it a bullshit persona. You start with a bullshit persona, you do your research, and only then do you have a persona. If you skip research, you’re left with just bullshit.
Why Interviewing Works
Interviewing combined with persona development for answering the critical question “Who are the users?” is a priceless lean user research technique with the following benefits:
• Direct: Nothing beats primary, face-to-face, in-context research where you ask questions, get answers, and observe human behavior. This direct, in-your-face setup is a priceless benefit of interviewing.
• Challenges perceptions: Each person who is involved in product development approaches new ideas for features, products, and services with a set of assumptions and perceptions about users, their needs, and their motivations. An interview is when these assumptions and perceptions are being fundamentally shaken, challenged, and in many cases, changed. All of that is moving toward one goal—uncovering (and caring about) the truth.
• Increases empathy: Just by conducting interviews with existing or potential users, taking notes during someone else’s interview, or observing live (or recorded) interviews, you become significantly more empathetic toward humans, especially those whom you see as your users. There’s probably no better way to attain this empathy.
• Builds credibility: Interview findings support product design and roadmap decisions in a way that adds credibility to your decision-making processes. Backing your product decisions with interview data is showing everyone around (investors, senior executives, paying customers) that your work is based on serious science, not on taking huge risks, intuition, or guesstimates.
Other Questions Interviewing Helps Answer
Other than the “Who are the users?” question, interviewing is a great method for answering the following questions. If you ask yourself any one of these questions, interviewing can help you get an answer:
• What are the different lifestyles of potential product users?
• What motivates people to behave in certain ways?
• Which user/s should I focus on?
• What jargon do people use to talk about a domain?
• What is the user’s workflow?
• Is there a need for the product/feature?
• What are the right requirements for the product?
How to Answer the Question
The following is a how-to guide that takes you step-by-step through the process of using interviewing and personas to answer the question “Who are the users?”
STEP 1: Create BS personas.
Gather your team, grab a sticky pad, whiteboard, or flip chart and bullshit your way into a couple of personas. A persona is an archetypical user of your product or service. Each product might have several personas. For example, an app for grocery shopping might have the following personas:
• The soccer mom
• The clueless male student
• The bored toddler
• And more...
Developing product personas is great for improving communication between different product development practitioners in your organization by creating a common language to describe groups of product users. Personas can help teams make product roadmap decisions. That said, personas will not help you decide if a button should say “Buy now” or “Pay now” or whether it should be green or blue.
A bullshit persona is a persona that is based on guesses (educated or not) and assumptions, rather than actual research and factual data. Sadly, many people stop after creating bullshit personas, thinking that by doing that they “are doing UX” or checking the box for research. To be clear, a persona (real or assumptive) is not a user research methodology. Rather, it’s a communication tool.
The power of the bullshit persona is that it helps you and your team focus your research, validate or invalidate your assumptions, and lead you to developing a real, research-based, valid, and reliable (no bullshit) persona.
Together with your team, ask yourselves the following questions and identify which aspects of your audience you are less sure of or familiar with.
1 How would you describe your target users? What are their primary characteristics?
2 Are there different groups of users?
3 How are user groups different?
4 Is there a particular group that is more important than the other ones?
5 Is there a particular group that you want to learn more about? Why?
6 Who are (or would be) the early adopters of your product? What are their characteristics?
The best way to