The Anatomy of a Contact Profile

A Contact Profile is a record of an individual user or customer designed to help you track the criteria important to you as a product manager.

The Basics

Tags

Tags help you organize customers based on your own criteria that play an important role in your product decisions. (More on that later.)

Personas

Personas help you assign and track real users under the valuable user types you refer to throughout product development.

CRM Link

As you’ll see, contact profiles are not meant to replace a CRM – but we do include a place for you to link to your CRM if you want to keep additional background information handy.

Put customer intelligence into your own hands

With just a handful of individual profiles, you can level up very quickly to deeper, more powerful insights into your customer base.

Go beyond individuals: filter feedback by persona

At a product company, the challenge is to deliver a product that serves many, not just a handful of vocal customers. We’ve introduced the ability to filter feedback by persona to help you fight that tendency to focus on the “small picture.”

With personas, you can zoom out and review customer feedback by segment, so you can understand the needs of a similar group of users as a whole.

So how does this work in practical terms? Here’s an example of how we use this at ProdPad:

We know that our customers, Adam and Liz are Power Users – a very important segment for our business – and we’ve marked them as such in ProdPad.

When they submit new feedback, we’re able to track it along with feedback from all our other Power Users. We can then investigate what advanced functionality Power Users across our customer base are asking for.

Use tags to create custom segments

Tags are really useful for tracking relevant criteria that can’t be captured via our defaults.  

Roles and specializations

For example, my job title is UX Designer, but there are dozens of different types of design. If you wanted to track this distinction formally, you could tag me as “Product Design,” “UI Design” or simply “Design.”

This way, you can actually drill down to see what different *kinds* of designers are asking for. 

Special groups, industries and fields

You can also use tags to help you quickly filter for feedback on specific product areas, like integrations:

There are a number of subjective ways to track individual users outside of the bio:

• “VIP”: For high-profile users who are uniquely valuable to your business (e.g. celebrities, influencers, etc.)
• Industry/Field: If your product is used across different industries, you can use this tag to help you track insights and use cases specific to that field
• Plans: Get more granular by tagging users by the specific subscription plan/package they’re subscribed to

Reach out to customers for user research

With feedback organized in one place, you can easily reach out to customers to dig up more insights.

Tags and personas are a useful way to reach back out to your customers for user testing, user interviews and other behind-the-scenes research.

If you’re revamping your mobile app, filter down to a list of users that wrote in with feature requests and suggestions and give them a chance to help you get it right.

So what next?

Contact profiles are a standard feature on all our plans – so you can start using this right away!

You can power up these user insights with Company Profiles to help you figure out what to build next at your B2B business.

The post How To Make The Most Out Of Contact Profiles appeared first on ProdPad.

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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People were resetting their passwords a lot, sometimes two or 3 times in a row. We couldn’t figure out why people were struggling to get in, but when we looked a little deeper, we realized that a good 30% of users were logging in with their email address.

Now, what’s wrong with that, you ask?

It turns out that some flip decision we made in the early days of ProdPad resulted in us requiring the use of a username instead of an email for logging in. For a while, we thought nothing of it, until we started seeing the pattern and it’s effects.

When we saw the 30% figure, our eyes bulged: We were kicking off error messages for nearly every third person who came back to use ProdPad, and in many cases, losing their attention as they got stuck into the ‘Reset Password’ flow.

We had a couple options:
1) Make it clearer that the username is to be used at login, not the email address.
OR
2) Pave the cowpath.

We decided to pave the cowpath.

Desire lines in User Behaviour

A (traditional) cowpath is the line in the grass that cows make as they forge their way through the field in a particular route. A herd of cows, like your users, will try to take the easiest path they can see, even if it means trampling the grass or cutting corners.

It leaves you with an unsightly line in your lawn… or in our case, unsightly drops in usage at the point of logging in! The path that they choose to take, in UX terminology, is often called a desire line or a cowpath.

Paving the cowpath, then, refers to changing or improving your app design to allow people to go the direction they were trying to go anywhere. Don’t penalize your users! Instead, help them get to where they wanted to go with as little hassle as possible.

Finding a Desire Line

If a user gets something wrong, I generally assume it’s something wrong with the app, not with the person.

In our case, even if the login page was technically working to spec, it still wasn’t right. It wasn’t working in a way that users were able to use consistently and without error, and so we took the approach to assume it needed to be updated.

Never underestimate the power of adding a little bit more tracking, as it proved very useful when it comes to troubleshooting. In our case, we used Papertrail to dig through the log files and ping us when something went wrong.

From there, it was just a little pattern recognition and common sense (the type of thing Product Managers are great at!).

Following the fix, we’re seeing significantly fewer login errors, fewer customer inquiries about login issues, and have freed up a chunk of time to focus on finding and improving other metrics.

Have you ever found and paved a cowpath? Let us know in the comments!

The post Paving the Cowpaths – Log in how you like appeared first on ProdPad.