Lecture 16 — How to Run a User Interview
Emmett Shear is an Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and TwitchTV.
He told about his first startup: It was a good time. We learned a lot. We learned a lot about programming. We didn’t know anything about calendars. Neither one of us were users of calendars. Nor did we, during the period of time we did the thing, go talk to anyone who actually did use a calendar. That was not optimal. We got the build stuff part of the startup down. We did not get to the talk to users part.
The second startup we started, we used a very common trick that lets you get away with not talking to users, which was that we were our own consumer. We had this idea for a television show, Justin.tv, a reality show of Justin Kan’s life. We built technology and a website around the reality show we wanted to run. We were the users for that product. One way to cheat and get away with not talking to many other users is to build something that literally is just for you. Then you don’t need to talk to anyone else because you know what you want and what you need.
They ran a very large number of user interviews. They talked to a lot of people and that data formed the core of all the decision making for the next three years of product features on Twitch. They continued to talk to users and in fact built an entire part of the company whose job it is to talk to our users.
They determined that the broadcasters were the most important people because when they went and looked into the market, Theylooked into what determined why people watched a certain stream or went to a certain website. You had a piece of content you loved and the broadcaster would come with you. Because if you go and talk to a set of users, if they had gone and talked to viewers only, they would have gotten completely different feedback than if they were talking to the broadcasters. Talking to the broadcasters gave us insight into how to build something for them. That turned out to be strategically correct. The recipe for figuring who the target user is for your product, and who your target user should be doesn’t exist.
They also talked to all the people who weren’t using us or our competitors. I think its very creative solution.