Understanding customers is about understanding people

One of the most valuable but perhaps most abstract changes that psychology brings to product is a different way of thinking about your users. At this year’s Mind the Product conference, Interaction and Experience Research Director for Intel – Genevieve Bell – shared with us an understanding of human behavior that could transform a product manager’s typical approach to their users. She highlighted that while we’re tempted to believe that changes in technology reflect changes in us as human beings, what makes us human in fact changes very slowly.

An appreciation of this bigger picture can make us better product managers. Genevieve herself – an anthropologist – is an example of Intel’s appreciation for a different outlook on understanding customers. And she’s not the only one; from psychology-led design consultancy Behaviour, to psychology graduate and founder of Fitbit Tim Roberts, many more with human behavior in their blood are turning their training to building and making products.

Don Norman even calls for changes to design education to better equip designers for the social experiences they are creating:

“In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully under-educated for the task.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every product manager needs to rush off back to school to get their psychology degree. But perhaps reading a book or article here or there, re-educating your team to consider the humanness of your customers, could give you the perspective you need to take your products from average to awesome.

Building sticky products is about habit forming

Getting into the heads of your users can be applied much more directly than a general approach to product, however. One of the industry’s leading thought leaders on the intersection between technology, business and psychology – Nir Eyal – also spoke to us at this year’s Mind the Product on the power of habit forming in your technology products.

“The hook is an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to your solution, with enough frequency to form habits.”

How Facebook, Twitter and other major technologies have exploded into our lives in the past few years is no pure coincidence. In theory, all product managers can use the science of habit forming to figure out how to trigger desired behavior in their users. Of course, that’s no simple task, but a little part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens can help to give us a head start. This stimulates the stress of desire, and it is these cravings that move us to action. Moving users to strive for rewards from your product, which might take the form of social, resource, mastery, or investment-based rewards can help you encourage them to come back again and again.

An example of this habits-based approach comes from Behaviour, who worked with psychologists at University College London to build behavioral insight into the design of an app for breast cancer charity CoppaFeel. Elements such as taking a pledge when starting the app to encourage a long-term commitment, and data on how many other users have ‘copped a feel’ for social proof, were developed to encourage young women to form a habit.

Perhaps an element of your product could be reimagined to encourage more habit-based behavior in the hunt for one of these basic human rewards.

Good products treat customers as humans at every step

As businesses we are sometimes guilty of investing all of our empathy for customers into the initial development of our products or marketing, but forgetting that these people face the same challenges when they’re using our products too. Kathy Sierra delivered a very strong message at Mind the Product, urging product people not to trade personas for stock photo images of their users after the sale.

When we’re trying to build great products it’s not just about motivating users, but keeping them on track in face of lagging willpower. So how can we overcome this derailment of our users? An important psychological concept to be mindful of when assessing your entire customer experience is cognitive leaks. Don’t suck away your users cognitive power when they’re trying to use your product; instead limit choice, provide clear instructions and support and offer clean feedback so your users’ brains can rest assured you’ve got it covered.

Don’t forget that your users never stop being the very human people that they are, and account for that at every stage of their customer journey.

The post The Psychology Behind Building Products: Psych-Savvy Product Management For Truly Human Technology appeared first on ProdPad.

A term popularized by startup writer Eric Ries, a minimum viable product (MVP) is “a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial user” – according to techopedia.

At the heart of it, the MVP philosophy about doing the least amount of work you can in order to learn the most of something.

When you release a new product, there are a whole lot of potential risks. What if people don’t see the value of your product? What if they just don’t love it? What if it’s not scalable? And what if it’s not financially viable? Or what if it’s not sufficiently differentiated from your competition? Or your market isn’t as big as you thought? Developing a minimal viable product is about reducing that risk so that you can maximize your success. When you push out an MVP as soon as is reasonable, you reduce your overheads, get faster feedback and all the while you’re able to measure your progress.

So how do you do it? How do you know when you’ve reached your MVP, when to stop building, and when to just get your product out there?

Taking a development term like this perhaps makes it seem more complicated a concept than it really is. Instead, you can probably take a look back to your grade 9 approach to science. In this introduction to the scientific method, all you were asked to do was to define a simple hypothesis and test it.

And much like your 9^th grade science experiment, when developing your MVP this can be broken down into a few simple steps:

• Declare your assumptions or business risks
• Organize them into a testable hypothesis
• Answer the question: what’s the smallest thing I can do or make to test this hypothesis
• Do it! (it’s your MVP)

The last thing to figure out is what to do with the data that comes back from your 9^th grade experiment. This is where the MVP philosophy is also about being bold. If your results show you that your hypothesis carries too much risk, you either change direction, or completely pivot, and try again.

A great example of this is Groupon. Before becoming the business we all know today, the Groupon team had created a social media platform focused on bringing people together around a cause, called The Point. When members showed a tendency to focus on saving money, The Point’s founders tested a simple MVP to test the hypothesis that group buying offered a better product/market fit. This took the form of a wordpress blog with PDF coupons. The success of this experiment is well-documented history of one of the fastest growing companies of all time.

Building an MVP isn’t about knocking out something quick and dirty or cutting corners. It’s not about deciding part way through development that you’ve about had enough and you want to give it a shot in the market. It’s about getting down to the very basics of the scientific method, and finding something to test.  The MVP approach to building products is much more than a specific method of development. It’s a mode of business that believes it pays off to invest in learning.

So if you have to, dig out those old excercise books and get back to the basics of experimentation, and you’ll be surprised by what your science teacher really taught you.

If you’d like to find out more on best practice processes, read our 7 pillars of product management

And if you’d like to discover how ProdPad can help you with awesome product management, sign up for a free trial here

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A UX specialist saves us time

Both Janna and I knew that we’d lack the time to produce every wireframe and update all the interactions properly. Saving us time has not only freed us up for other aspects of this project, but it has saved everyone time across the entire team. If either or both of us were responsible for UX then the developers could only move as fast as we could get them updates. We wanted to remove ourselves as bottlenecks completely from the ProdPad Regeneration project

Not only would this lack of time have delayed how quickly we could move, but a patchy process of wireframing – executed when we could grab a spare 30 minutes – would have seriously limited the scope of what we could revamp and improve. Hiring a UX expert has helped us to avoid creating a disjointed UX experience; instead we’re developing something that’s focused and cohesive across the whole app.

A UX specialist offers fresh eyes

Like any founders, both Janna and I have been completely immersed in ProdPad for the last few years. We know too much about the logic that went behind any UX decisions, and we’ve adapted to all oddities. We applied as few constraints as possible for Mojca and we made it clear that we were keen for her to question absolutely everything.

We wanted the UX update for ProdPad’s regeneration to be a revolution instead of an evolution. By bringing in fresh eyes and a fresh perspective we opened up the redesign to wider possibilities, that Janna and I were just too close to see.

Which brings me to my last and most important reason

A UX specialist brings us real expertise

While Janna and I can do UX, there is a difference between doing this as product manager versus as a professional. We just don’t have the same knowledge and expertise as someone who’s studied UX in detail and worked on a huge number of projects for a huge variety of applications.

The expertise that Mojca has brought to the table has been the key component to allow a revolution for ProdPad’s UX in this project. Her expertise has offered us three key advantages over and above our efforts going it alone

1. Cohesive and comprehensive UX for interactions, right down to the smallest details
2. UX improvements that neither Janna and I would have thought of that push the boundaries of what I thought possible
3. A stronger foundation of intelligent design so that the UX of ProdPad will suit those just starting out and our advanced users alike

The UX improvements we’re going to bring about through the ProdPad Regenerated project certainly isn’t the end, but Mojca’s work has laid a fantastic foundation for us to continue to evolve and improve the UX of ProdPad in the future. We simply could not have done it without her help.
This experience has brought home for me the role that Product Managers play in the centre of tech, business and customer. While you need knowledge in all three areas yourself, knowing when to step back and bring in the expertise and coordinate with the other functions is even more important. Hiring a UX expert has not only helped us to see through this project, but it has made us better product managers.

If you’d like to find out more about how we’re regenerating ProdPad, or even to get onto the beta programme, get in touch with us here or on @prodpad

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3 UX principles for better product development

1. Start by eliminating the negative experiences

No matter what your starting data source – from usability testing to customer support feedback – identifying and removing your customers’ stumbling blocks is the first step towards offering them a better user experience. Removing friction to a seamless experience is an essential prerequisite before you can really start to create additional value. Product people have much to learn from the classic psychology principle of negative enforcement: removing adverse stimuli can reinforce behavior for your users to return again and again. And those adverse stimuli should be sought out at every step of the customer journey. Removing friction goes further than high-level problem-solving, and deeply understands user behavior to make sure that a good idea to solve a problem isn’t thwarted by sloppy execution.

[bctt tweet= “Removing friction is an essential prerequisite before you can start to create additional value.”]

2. Stay focused on long-term user goals

To remain experience-focused, product managers must continually seek to balance user and business needs. We could easily argue that this question of balance is misleading as ultimately, these are one and the same thing. Continually meeting their needs puts you in the strongest position to retain your users’ custom. But every product manager knows that day-to-day decisions aren’t immediately that simple. When faced with short-term commercial concerns, technical objectives and even pure asthetics, it’s easy to lose sight of your raison d’être – long-term business success. Paul Brooks has neatly adapted the Steve Covey time management quadrant for this balance, where intelligent design is the sweet spot for meeting long-term goals.

3. Be one step ahead with proactive experiences

Living and breathing your users’ needs means that you can delight customers with proactive user experience design. Going a step further than removing friction, you can actually anticipate where your customers will encounter problems before they come to you with them. Ensure that the products you build guide your users rather than provide them with information to figure it out themselves. And to really meet their long-term goals, dedicate time to imagine features that go beyond the expected. A completely comprehensive approach to user experience considers every possible angle and aims to never leave customers waiting for more.

[Tweet “User Experience isn’t just for UX Designers”]

Limited time bonus! Join us for the Lean UX workshop on Thursday, September 11th in London. Claim your 15% discount here (good for two workshops).

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Product Roadmapping Goals

Our goal was two-fold:
1) To determine where we wanted to take ProdPad next, now that the roadmap updates were out, following a slew of user feedback and other insights. This involved taking a good, hard look at what was on the current roadmap, and really hashing out some plans and thoughts on where we want to go next.

2) Put the product roadmap building tool to the test, in a live meeting environment. We cracked open the projector, and got the roadmap on the wall and a stack of sticky notes in hand. With this mixture of digital and physical, the session was pretty painless and collaborative. We had everything we needed to jot down ideas on what should go where on the roadmap, and our digital roadmap tool allowing us to simply drag and drop to update in real time.

As far as roadmapping sessions go, this was a breeze!

Along the way, we came up with a series of new wishlist items for the product roadmap template, minor but impactful things, inspired by either our usage or our users’ feedback. That same day, we set to updating a number of things with the roadmap and the site as a whole.

Changes to our Product Roadmap Building Software

Here’s a few of the updates now live:

• The Roadmap Export is now available in both a ‘Regular’ and a ‘Detailed’ view.  Detailed view shows the full associated Idea and User Story details for each roadmap card, instead of the more compact count visible in the Regular view.
• When complete, roadmap cards can now be archived.  These are then found in a new section for completed cards, showing your ‘Completed Roadmap’ as you go.
• You can now create a new roadmap card directly from the Idea Canvas page, without going back and forth.
• You can add multiple ideas to a card at once, using the Bulk Edit feature.
• Various usability tweaks, and some performance tweaks that should make the whole thing feel faster and easier to use.

Throughout the website, you’ll now find these and a whole pile of other little tweaks.  If there’s something else you’d like to see, we’re all ears!  Get in touch at hello@prodpad.com.

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