Fall of a Successful Product
How User Research could have saved it.
You always expect your hard work to succeed. Nobody ever imagines that something could ever go wrong when they put in their unmatched determination and dedication. It was almost a year ago somewhere in the summers, a group of young talented engineers started to solve the tech hiring hassles in the country. They wanted the product to be a one stop hiring solution to premium candidate requirements in a product based startup/enterprise. They did not want to go wrong on any aspect hence they were pretty keen on hiring a designer right from phase 0. Hey! and magically they hired, guess who ??…aah well! Yours truly ;-), I designed the product, everybody loved the product, the product became the most sought after for hiring in the startup world and today the product is no more. The big question mark — who killed the hiring/recruitment industry disrupter?
Lets go back to time when we had come out with our newly designed product. The interface was easy to use, minimalistic and became successful among its users (both jobseekers and the employers in no time). This was the most important point for the product that I had marked in my mind while designing the interface. I wanted to connect with the user emotionally and gain confidence by showcasing them ultra slick interface which would assure that this product can very easily and surely solve their job switch hassle. Gaining that confidence of the user was the most important aspect and even more for the employers because they cannot trust anyone and everyone who comes up with a list of candidates for hiring. The startups that we targeted in our first stage of marketing were ready to roll out impressive job offers to our candidates but wanted the ‘actual’ talent. Also the operations team connected very well with the clients to understand their requirements and give demos of the product on how much time, money and effort this simple platform could save for these busy entrepreneurs.
Within a couple of months, the response of the product was evident. Candidates liked it, employers loved it. We were pretty much ahead of our competitor. Our clientele now included many big wigs of the startup industry, and above all they liked our product. We were pretty agile in our process of development. We didn’t ever care for the process (sadly), all we knew was ‘Get the shit done’. Any request from the employer (client) got immediately implemented (most of them in under a week or so). We used to work, rework on the designs and the final design was always the outcome of several iterations.
As a result, we started expanding, grew up into a bigger design team, included many other features which made us closer to the one stop hiring solution tag. We received wonderful emails from employers on how we have solved their nightmare — HIRING TALENT!!!. We deserved it all, we had spent a semester alone improving the interface of the employer side of the product. We at that moment wanted to get most of the tech biggies on board with us. Because when you have good companies where nice talent wanted to work in your clientele then automatically talent follows you. Not surprisingly! Todays market is very vulnerable, one product cannot keep all the user base hooked up for that long (until you meet their requirements). So, as a result of subsiding the efforts on the requirements of jobseekers, we couldn’t make our mark in this user base.
Where we went wrong
We had a fairly large team of Sourcing which used to attract candidates and create their profiles manually (sadly) but we never had time to look into the issue and solve it. We had no time for research to perform on our users.
Getting ready for another explosion
As we were not too candidate friendly, now was the time to redesign the process. This time we made sure that we put in lot of effort together to make the profile creation process seamless and easy. Product Managers came up with the list of new pointers that were to be asked this time and the form filling was even more aggressive. The vision of the product managers was to provide highest possible level of transparency to the user, be it in any way, hence, resulting in even more input fields. The only relaxation was that a part of them were not compulsory. This project seemed very challenging to me. I wanted to increase a new high conversion rate with the redesign but the even longer :-\ form wouldn’t let this happen in any case. After a lot of toil, the design team came up with new mockups that asked the information in a very interesting way making it seem (only seem) easier for the candidates.
How we made the form more user friendly:
- We came up with conversation style form because our user research clearly projected for us that most of our users were tech savvy and they were good at switching options with a tab key rather than shifting the options using trackpad or mouse.
2. Conversation style form decreased the height of the page with more fields per line as compared to conventional style forms.
3. We moved all the optional fields to the next section (altogether next page) of the form filling so as to not overwhelm the user.
4. All the optional fields lured the user with brownie points. Filling up of optional information provided more credibility to their profile which we indicated using form completion index.
The new design was very much appreciated by the users whose feedback we captured in usability testing. Experts too liked it compared to previous design. But still the product couldn’t garner more users.
Where we failed-
Sadly, this story did not have a happy ending. Nothing strange, you fail to learn more..accepted. In addition,a couple of factors were responsible too for the fall of the product.
We could have averted this by definitely conducting more user research.
I have learnt a lot many lessons from this big fiasco of my career. Any budding entrepreneurs who discuss their new product with me, I give them this very important tip.
To design it for the user you have to understand the user. To understand the user, you have to conduct research. And a good intensive research is a time taking process which connects you deeply with the users. An intense research done at the initial phase of the product enables you to keep the picture of the user persona deep in your mind.
This should be the intensity of the research, only then the product can be called truly user-centered. So, now when I hear Product mangers say that I want the user to do this at any cost. I just smile at their innocence and pray to god ‘hope that they improve with experience’ (smile).
I’d like to thank the entire team, for working and learning with me.
Special thanks to Kritika Sharma, Disha Gandhi and Aditi Sen for their help in proof-reading this.
