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At CoInspire, we believe key to creating successful products starts with understanding your target customers and aligning your ideas precisely to addressing their needs. The more thoughtful you’re about product-customer alignment, the more likely your product will be used they those customers. Here is how.

Describe Your Target Customers

You can start the process by filling out the following information:

Identify customer types

First, you need to think of the types of customers your product or services is intended to support. They can be identified and named based on a number of ways:

• how they use a product (e.g., “Buyer”, “Seller”, “Consumer”, “Advertiser”)
• personality (e.g., “Thrifty Shopper”, “Careless Spender”)
• skill level (e.g. “Power User”, “Newbie User”)
• what they do for a living (e.g., “Product Manager”, “Lawyer”, “Student”)
• social role (e.g. “Husband”, “Wife”, “Children”)

For example, if yours is an eCommerce site, your target users could be “Buyer” and “Seller”; if you’re working on enterprise software, your target users could be “Product Manger” and “Software developer”; if you’re developing a financial planning tool, your target users could be defined by their personality, such as “Thrifty Shopper”, “Careless Spender”.

Who are they

Once you got the user types, for each type of users, you need to describe who they are, including one or more of the following:

• Role and responsibilities: For example, you can describe the role of a Husband, the responsibilities of a Product Manager.
• Behaviors and tasks: For example, an eBay Seller typically perform a few tasks — listing an item by taking picture and writing description, waiting for buyers to bid, answering buyer questions, and shipping the item once bought.
• Personality: For example, an Thrifty Spender is very careful about the cost and benefit tradeoff when buying things, and the purchase decision is always favor of saving money.
• Technology and tools they use: This provides a context when you think of the technology suited for the target users. For example, a Lawyer is typically less tech savvy and leverages traditional Office tools more so than a Software Developer.

Pain points and needs

You’ll then list their pain points and unmet needs that your product is expected to address. For instance, Continue reading →

Let’s have a discussion around how to develop products customers will use — by creating a product concept and getting customer validation to ensure you’re working on the right idea.

Through many years of providing product strategy and UX consulting to leading tech companies, we’ve seen a very interesting, persistent pattern that leads to many failures of creating successful products:

Didn’t get customer feedback at early stage

Product creators — entrepreneurs, product managers, designers, etc. — come up with ideas for new products and features all the time. Then they jump into implementation, such as UI design, coding, nearly right away, driven by the conviction they’re onto something big. However…

Many months later, after the UI is designed and the coding reaches perfection, they all of sudden remember to do customer validation (e.g., usability testing, launch and learn, A/B testing of live product).

It is at that time they realize for the first time that they’ve been working on the wrong thing all along.

Why can’t they validate the idea before it goes into implementation to make sure they’re woking on the right features, targeting the right users, and envisioning the product experience in the right way?

Or, get misleading feedback on vague early ideas

Some product creators do get early feedback on their ideas. But that doesn’t work either:

Because idea is abstract and vague, and can be interpreted as different things by different people. Therefore, the feedback you get doesn’t accurately gauge whether you’re working on the right thing or not.

That’s why product creators often wonder:

“Why customers said they would use our product but when the product is launched they are not using it?”

Concept is the missing link between Idea and Execution

By jumping directly from an idea to execution, the product team essentially loses the opportunity to make sure they are working on the right thing, as well as figure out necessary details to guide successful execution:

This would lead to either a well-executed product that no one wants, or a poorly executed idea that could have been successful.

Concept is the missing link that translates the idea into tangible product description that can get concrete, meaningful customer feedback and that provides guidance for the execution.

Continue reading →

We all know the importance of developing products based on customer needs, because after all they’re the ones using the products, not us. However, in reality most companies do it the other way around, starting from their perspective — instead of a customer perspective — when coming up with new products.

Before: Feature-Driven Innovation

Many companies start with these questions when thinking about developing a new product or improving an existing one:

“What features do we want to develop? What technology do we have that could make these features happen?”

Then they tell themselves — through a combination of wishful thinking and misinterpreting customer input — that the product thus conceived will be useful for customers.

I call this approach “feature-driven innovation”, because it starts with thinking about features the product team can build, and then forcing the features onto customers. This is a common practice of many companies.

The end result is often disappointing: on the one hand, companies are able to develop products with powerful features with cutting-edge technology. Yet the products don’t meet a real customer need and therefore fail in the market.

Now: Customer-Inspired Innovation

The solution is actually quite simple: start your product with customers in mind, by asking yourself these questions:

“Who are our target customers? What are they like? What are the gaps in their needs, and ultimate how would our product address the gaps?”

This way, you are not tied to the features and technical constraints. Instead, you start with a customer perspective, and then work out a way to address their needs through a product solution.

“Customer-inspired”, not “customer-driven”

Continue reading →

Here’s a question that I often encounter when helping companies conduct user research: Designers, product managers, and sometimes front-end developers will come to me and say: We’ll do some guerrilla/DIY user research to validate this design idea.

Just in case you mistake this for Chairman Mao’s Guerrilla Warfare — guerrilla user research refers to informal, small-scale, on-the-fly user research, typically conducted by non-UX-professionals to validate product design.

It’s a big part of the so-called lean UX process, an approach that has gained much popularity with the advent the lean start-up movement. Continue reading →

Ever wonder the role of user experience in relation to business results? Read what the failed founder of Wasabi — the key competitor and the first mover relative to Mint.com — said about why Mint killed Wasabi: