Who isn’t deeply entrenched in the technical details of their app, software system, and SAAS product?
We have all marvelled at our own skills in our projects and tasks, but it can be particularly challenging to overcome the technicalities of hooking together APIs, methodologies, and languages.
Very often we lose sight of the fact that our consumer doesn’t care. Quite frankly, they are not impressed, which is a shame when so much effort and energy goes into these problem-solving issues.
However, it’s also a complement for our products. If our customers can marvel at the way something just works; how it saves them time; avoids manual processes; saves duplicating data; and any additional boring repetitive tasks, then this is a huge success.
Our customers don’t have a lot of time or attention; it’s harder than ever for your product to stand out and to hold anyone’s attention for any period of time.
In today’s world it is easy to miss the new developments in technology.
Customers need to know with certainty the benefits of your product, so design should be really clear about those benefits. With a million distractions, our customers can be overwhelmed, so it’s important to engineer in the benefits and outcomes first. The marketing differentials need to be ‘baked in’ from the beginning.
That’s why I believe we should all be running our projects with end-user feedback and not just that of key stakeholders.
You will need to recognise that the end-user will have two sets of feedback:
1. What they think they want while the product is being designed?
2. What they actually do with the product once it is created?
The difference is the social behaviour in using the product. It’s why the bluetooth headset was a great idea but didn’t look cool enough to survive the market. It’s why Apple Airpods are now dominating the market with 85 percent of wireless headset sales in the USA in 2017.
When a project enters real life, it’s your job to get the real life feedback and not be frustrated by it, but embrace it, for it’s feedback that will make your product engagement levels significantly higher.
Users will want things they don’t need and need stuff they don’t want. Its your job to design beautiful screens and dashboards that get the user engaging in the product every day.
If you look for these two sets of feedback then your product has every chance of getting traction in the market. With an end-user mindset you will be grounded to the output and the outcomes of your solution.
Our users will always over or underestimate the significance of their wants and desires.
Our only truly scare resource is time; if we can focus on creating the wonderful assets and maximising our return from our developers and project team’s time, there is an opportunity for our customers to be delighted at the results.