There’s a lot of best practices we’ve learned over the years developing products for our clients. One of the important lessons is that developing a brand new product for a startup is very different from developing a second or third generation product for a more established company.
I’d like to focus on some of the pitfalls that can happen with an existing product’s user base. But before I can tell you what’s wrong, I have to show you how it can work when everything is right.
The Magic of the User
When developing a product, you have to involve your users early and often. If you substitute your own judgement for theirs, you will likely end up designing a system with the wrong or useless functionality that won’t be appealing to your target user. Involving the user thus saves both time and money, as you won’t have to build all of that useless stuff.
All of the projects that we’ve worked on that involved actual users have been smashing successes. Most of the projects we’ve worked on that didn’t involve users have produced quality, functionally correct products, but had to be retooled as the marketplace (the ultimate collection of users) uncovered shortcomings in the design.
Now there are some tricks to getting the most out of users — you can’t just pen them in a room and take dictation on what they think should be in the new product. Here are a few tips:
- Get a small, representative group of users together. They should reflect your initial set of personas that you’ve brainstormed for the product. If in refining your requirements you find you missed some, not problem. Just add them as you find them. If they are opinion leaders, so much the better.
- Focus on getting the smallest set of features to them that allows them to complete meaningful tasks with the product. Toy systems that don’t do anything will stall their input.
- Don’t just ask questions and take dictation. Use the tools of User Experience Design (UXD) to anticipate and tease out requirements. Give your users options and choices rather than open ended questions. Product development isn’t a random stroll through the product space, but a guided exploration.
The Very Old Product Problem
Remember those dedicated word processors that came out right after personal computers and dot matrix printers made a splash on the scene? They were essentially computers for people who didn’t like computers. You could edit a document in it’s memory, perhaps save it to tape or floppy, and print it out on it’s embedded printing mechanism. They were like a typewriter where the connection between the keyboard and the typebars had been broken.
These products were not terribly successful and were soon drowned in the flood of PC’s.
But how did these products come about? I wasn’t in the room when Brother and Canon developed theirs, but I’ve seen these second and third generation product development exercises before and am willing to hazard a guess: they asked their users.
Most times asking your users is a great idea — see my argument above. In this case it was a very bad idea.
Why? How can it be that asking your users can be the worst thing you do in developing your product? The secret here is the age of your product. How out of date is it? To be blunt, if in 2010 your product is a dowdy PC application originally developed for Windows 3.1 and provided to your users via a remote desktop solution, then you’ve got a system as old and antiquated as dirt. Now if you were selling cigars or wine, making it the way it’s been made for thousands of years may have some panache, but if you are delivering cutting edge, technologically sophisticated products…not so much.
A system like yours, when the web is already in it’s third decade, will have repelled the younger more technically savvy users and self selected those who prefer your dinosaur to all those newfangled web and iPad applications. Your users like awkward, technically backward, poor usability, slowness. They prefer it. It makes them comfortable. And as a result, if your goal is to transform your antique into a modern, highly usable application, you can’t use or trust anything they tell you.
We’ve seen it happen too many times. What gets designed and implemented is that same Windows 3.1 application in a web or mobile wrapper, with all it’s flaws and weaknesses. Your second generation product development effort will have been a big waste of money.
So, what to do? Recruit your competitors customers, that’s what! If you have a competitor with more modern software and a more technically savvy customer base, that is who you should recruit. That is the part of the marketplace, after all, to whom you are trying to appeal. Be aware, however, that you might not be able to please both your old customers and your new ones. After all, your old customers were riding the dinosaur for a reason.
