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.

Don’t go overboard on your interview squad

Whenever you’re going into a customer interview, you need to be sure you’re well equipped to make the most of it. But you don’t want to intimidate your customers. Two of you is plenty: one to talk, one to take notes. And for one-on-one interviews, consider recording it instead (if you ask nicely, of course).When you’ve worked so hard on a prototype of a new product idea it’s very exciting. And so it’s very tempting to show it off straight away to your customers in interview. Iif you want to get to the heart of their real problems, attitudes and opinions, save it for the end. Start instead with an open conversation.

Be careful with prompts

It can be difficult to get some people to open up, so try asking simple yes/no questions if open-ended questions don’t get you much of a response. Then follow up by asking “Why?” Prompts such as “tell me about” might also help you to trigger something.

Embrace silence

Perhaps an interviewer’s biggest fear is complete silence. It’s an even higher risk the more customers you have in the room at once. But as long as you’re not the one phased by silence, all will be fine. It might not sound friendly, but let your customers feel the pain of silence until they crack. In fact you can wait an entire minute before you follow up with another prompt

Don’t make customer interviews personal

Your products are your babies, but you want to avoid conveying this to your customers. If they feel like your pride is at stake based on their feedback, they likely won’t be honest. Caveat your hypotheses with the opinions of ‘others’, “people have suggested to me that…. Do you agree.” And be very careful to be light and breezy when asking for feedback. Remember that criticism is your best opportunity to learn, and you want to hear it.

For even more tips on what to do – and what not to do – during a customer interview, watch this great video from the LIFFFT Inc guys.

ProdPad can help you to tag, organize and link your customer feedback to your product roadmap. Sign up for a free trial here

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Surface the timeliest feedback

Your customer support team are the first port of call for your users’ frustrations and challenges. Customer feedback of course might come from many different sources, but here your customers’ most pressing pain points (those they are pushed to reach out to you about) can highlight some of the changes you absolutely must make if you are to keep their business. When customer representatives make use of user feedback capture tools in ProdPad, you can be sure that each of these instances are recorded and that no threatening issue is overlooked.

Delight customers

As well as fixing their pain, good customer service is also about delighting users. When customer service teams and product management teams work together effectively, they can identify new opportunities to delight users with quick product wins. At ProdPad, we ourselves use tags such as ‘fun’ on ideas dedicated purely to making customers happy.

Making use of ProdPad’s features and integrations, it’s easy to communicate those changes back to relevant customers too. A complete feedback loop is made simpler by either recording customer contact details directly against feedback and ideas, or by integrating tools such as UserVoice to automate updates to customers when their suggestions have been taken on board.

Build a workable case

When customer service data is shared with product management, problems can be better solved and value more easily created. But how does this work? If you are to avoid the frustration of customer reps who feel their feedback is going ignored, or the stress of product managers who are bombarded by the same enquiries day in and day out, good process is key.

In ProdPad, user feedback is logged separately from fully formed product ideas. This way customer service teams aren’t limited in the number of times they log a piece of feedback, in fact comprehensive coverage of this important information should be encouraged. Yet in linking feedback to a single product idea each time the issue is surfaced, product managers can avoid repetition and keep track on the traction of an idea in a measured way.  Service teams can help to build a workable case for a new idea and champion their customers’ needs, keeping everyone happy.

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If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad can facilitate collaboration between product management and customer support teams, get in touch for a chat or sign up for a free trial

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Direct customer involvement

Customer conversations

Whenever they get the opportunity, product managers should be having real conversations with real users. Depending on your business model this might mean picking up the phone or organising to meet with small groups in person. Whether to discuss a particular piece of feedback, an idea on the roadmap or just a check in with core users, it’s important to start talking. These conversations can not only surface fresh product insight, but help us to internalise our customers’ needs, problems and attitudes.

MVP and user testing

An important element of the MVP philosophy is to get products out to customers at the earliest possible stage. You should make only the necessary assumptions about your users’ needs to build minimum viable products that can be taken to customers for feedback. Use wireframes to walk your customers through new products and changes, and share prototypes with customers at different stages of product development to make sure you’re on the right track.

Open roadmap

Sharing your roadmap with customers both keeps them informed and gives you perspective on how effectively you’re moving towards your product vision. However, that doesn’t mean you have to share your entire inner workings with customers. If you have particular projects or developments you aren’t ready to make public, create a customer-friendly version of your roadmap that you’re happy to discuss in full detail.

Indirect customer involvement

Customer feedback

Although customer feedback comes from customers initially, it is a data source that should be analysed alongside other factors rather than taken at face value. Product Managers should base decisions heavily on customer feedback, but individual suggestions shouldn’t guide product evolution or development time. Listening to feedback is about trying to piece together the big picture of customer needs.  Look for trends in customer feedback, and weight ideas differently depending on who they come from – feedback from your target market is the most important of all.

User personas

User personas are virtual representatives of your customers. They have a name, a face and personal details, but they aren’t real people. They are fictional representations, based on the real conversations that helped you to understand your customers inside-out. Building user personas allows you to do product management grounded in user needs, without getting bogged down in the detail of specific customers and all their anomalies. Before you take your new product ideas out to real customers, test your inkling, staff suggestion or piece of feedback against your personas.

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If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad helps you to work effectively with customers, get in touch with us here. 

And if you’re new to ProdPad, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial here.

The post What’s the Role Of Your Customer In Product Management? appeared first on ProdPad.

It goes without saying how important it is to listen to your customers.  If you’re collecting ideas from a large group of external users, you should certainly have a look at using UserVoice.

UserVoice is a great tool for gathering ideas from your user base, and uses voting to help sound out which are the most popular ideas.  Combined with a set of tools to communicate  online help directly back to the folks who are asking for various features, it makes for a powerful voice-of-customer tool. 

Combined with ProdPad, it’ll give you a huge advantage in providing awesome customer support while building toward your product vision.

ProdPad lets you outline your product strategy and create visual roadmaps.  It also serves as an idea management and user feedback system for your team to use internally.

The new integration with UserVoice will allow you to take the most popular requests and send them into ProdPad as either a new Idea or a new piece of User Feedback.  These, in turn, can be put on your roadmap, or spec’d out and sent to development, closing the loop between what users want and what you’re actually building.

Setting up the UserVoice integration

 You can set this up by heading to the Integrations & API tab in ProdPad, and then clicking on the UserVoice icon underneath the “Add an Integration” option.

When setting up an integration with UserVoice, you have the choice of having it create new ideas in ProdPad, or logging it as new user feedback (which can then be turned into ideas). You’ll be asked to create a ‘trigger’ on the UserVoice side, either when a new suggestion is made, or (if you plan on curating the suggestions first), when you change the status of a suggestion in UserVoice to something specific that you decide on:

Once you’ve created the mapping between UserVoice and ProdPad, you’ll then simply need to plug your API key into UserVoice following our simple instructions, and the integration is set up.

ProdPad also has integrations available for the other tools you use, such as JIRA, Rally, Trello, Pivotal Tracker and more.  Integrations are available for any Plus, Premium or Enterprise account.

Start your trial today

Getting the most out of the UserVoice integration

To make the most out of this integration, use UserVoice to provide an end-user portal for gathering ideas and feedback.  When an idea garners enough attention, consider sending it on to ProdPad, where it can be fleshed out in more detail.  In ProdPad, it can be broken down into user stories, associated with specific products or areas on your product roadmap, and included with detailed specifications including mockups and functional specs.

Suggestions from UserVoice can be turned into User Feedback in ProdPad, and then grouped into larger ideas or initiatives that your product development team might want to work on.

On the flip side, you can send these ideas or user stories on to your development team, either individually or via one of our direct integrations with tools such as Pivotal Tracker, Trello, JIRA or others.  As the features gets worked on and updated in your development tool, the status for the original idea in ProdPad will get updated.

Once the idea shows as being released, you’ll know exactly which customers asked for it and when, thanks to the User Feedback integration with UserVoice!Try the integration today, and let us know what you think in the comments below or directly at hello@prodpad.com.

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