Pivoting a product according to research
Can you tell me your thoughts on this product? Or how about if you found anything difficult to understand? Would you use it more if we did this…
These are some of the continuous questions asked when interrogating your clients and users through a research phase of developing a product. And, in my previous experience it’s pretty pointless! In this post I hope to explain why it is important to listen to your research, fully understand it and actually use.
Before working at Quander (an event tech company), I would tell you research is sacrileges, with previous companies spending huge budgets on research as part of a product building process, only for it to be out trumped by senior stakeholders within the business. Research is not only sacrileges but also overlooked, ignored and seen as an ‘extra’ part of the design process. I mean, surely you know your product by now? Surely you know everything about your audience? You work on it every day right?
Here is a basic design process which many designers use to build a product.
When first starting with Quander it wasn’t much more than a set of developers, simply building up their products with their skills and own thoughts. One thing they was serious about though was research! They were prepared to invest their design budget in user and client research to help build a new part of their product to hopefully tap into a larger audience. Quander already had an idea of how to do this, what they thought their users wanted and was the key to tapping into this new market, and could have easily just went ahead and took it upon themselves to develop the new part of the product just based on what they already thought they knew. Be it a small startup this would make the most sense, as research is certainly not cheap and easy!
Quander and myself developed a strategy to create what we thought the new part of the product could be in a prototype format, and then test with our current users to get their opinions and how they would use it. The response we received was good, although be it problematic. We found that our current user base were likely to struggle if they were to migrate over to the new product due to it being to rigid and self managed by the user, they required more flexibility in using our product and valued the support from the Quander team.
Our learnings lead us to pivot the product direction. It taught us that our current user base were in the greatest part happy with the current product, albeit a few pain points and problems which helped make the decision to not build the newer version of the Quander product. Instead a tidy up of all the problems we encountered and discovered.
But, wait, what about the new audience!? Yes we didn’t forget about them, we still had to find a way to try and reach them. As we learnt that designing a new version of Quander wasn’t going to work with our current user base. We decided to build a completely new product, Shutterbug. Shutterbug is our consumer facing product, our pivot product, our trump product and our listen and learn product. It targets the new larger audience and has been designed and built with all of this in mind; along with our previous learnings, skills and knowledge.
This makes Quander a perfect example of how you should pivot a product according to your research and why it is so important when making product decisions to truly listen.