When developing your own product, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of having your idea that you’re attached to being brought to life.
When developing your own product, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of having your idea that you’re attached to being brought to life. You may have certain beliefs about what it should and shouldn’t be, and protect it.
Oftentimes business owners get caught in their own preferences at the downfall of usability and the actual audience. They may be too protective of what things should be, that they never question what it has to be in order to work.
But, the most important thing your new product or business idea has to be at the bottom line is: user-centric. If having a successful product is something that matters to you.
User-Centricity is a UX (user experience) term that basically means the design process is focused solely on the user’s needs, preferences, desires & behaviors. Resulting in thorough research into your audience, their pain points, and testing features or ideas with them until finding the one that fits into how they operate.
In this way, the product you are creating has a higher probability of not only amassing the users you want, but keeping them. Lowering churn and putting something that solves their problems into their hands. This works for the digital world, and the physical product world.
It gives you a deeper understanding of how your product fits into your audience’s life. And allows your product development process to actually keep the focus on the audience rather than founder or team preferences.
It doesn’t mean you have to scrap all of your ideas, but it does mean that you have to be less attached to features and more attached to how the product fits into the real world.
Because nothing is worse than pouring money into designs, product development and more, only to find out that your product interrupts their workflow- or doesn’t actually fit into their day to day life.
Research
Research in a user-centric process looks like conducting user interviews, surveys and usability testing. Usually asking certain questions like:
It can also look like completing market research, product fit and demographics.
User Personas
Creating user personas should be easy. Once you’ve completed the research phase, you’ll create a fictional user persona based on the common pain points, behavior, desires, demographics and other information learned.
Through the lens of the persona you’ve created, you inform design decisions, marketing efforts and prioritize development rollout.
Prototyping & Testing
You’ve completed the first two steps and have finally begun creating new product designs and prototypes. Now it’s important to remember this step: testing & iteration.
Your first draft of the product will not be the one you roll out, it’ll be the one you test against your personas or real users. Then you will iterate it based on the feedback you receive.
It’s crucial to not become attached to certain features or the way things look. Your preferences should only override a user preference if it’s truly innovative and unique, and find that it only needs a few early adopters in order to retain mass adoption over time.
Through iteration, you land on a final version.
Creating The Solution
Now that you’ve completed the groundwork, you can lean into finalizing your solution and developing it into the market.
It is crucial that any solution you land on for your product is researched, tested and iterated upon before you launch it. And once you’ve found that solution and have built it, it’s important to maintain realistic marketing expectations and know that every decision you make should be informed based on the user personas you created before and the data.
The easiest way to incorporate this practice into your business is to make time for research. Two weeks of researching and talking to real people who may use your product, and you might find that you need to adapt certain things you never thought about before, or you may find that your initial idea is validated but you’re missing out on one key feature that determines its usability.
Understanding your audience, and talking to them, researching them and the market, is a core part of building user centric products and services.
Don’t be that business owner who spends thousands of dollars in product development without investing any money or time into testing, and user-centric practices first. You may spend all this time making a product look cool, but it doesn’t mean you spent a lot of time making a product usable.
Take your time, slow it down- and you’ll find the results to be much more satisfying than without.
