What user research will not tell you.
Day 3 of my journey working on a wellness app focussed on preserving and re-living positive memories. Read about Day 2 here.
Day 3.
Between yesterday and today, the team conducted about 10 user interviews — evenly split between millennials and Baby Boomers, female heavy with a few male participants. We asked about what apps they last used for wellbeing/mindfulness, what they liked/didn’t like about them, and what prompted them to use these apps in the first place? Lots of learnings along the way and we’re continuing to tweak our questions along the way.
As expected, each interview resulted in a unique set of insights and in consolidating our learnings, we had a lot more questions than answers! It was an uneasy feeling at first, but I reminded myself that it was good this was happening at this stage in the project’s development.
“Unanswered questions aren’t threats; they’re challenges and catalysts.” — Colin Wright, colin.io
Moving from the ‘we think this is it!’ stage to the space in between ‘we might be on to something’ and ‘we think this is it!,’ may seem like a step back. But actually I think it’s a critical moment in product discovery. We may not get product/market fit right in the beginning, but building the product upon a solid foundation of customer insights and problems suggests we’ll very likely increase your chances!
Before creating landing pages, building MVPs, A/B testing taglines… we needed to establish a hypothesis of the specific value we were offering to a very specific group of people. Only once we could nail a solid hypothesis, could we then throw it into the world and iterate on it extensively to prove or disprove our hypothesis.
I mistakenly thought our user interviews could answer some of these questions for us. While they will guide you to figuring out many things, your interviews won’t directly tell you:
What user interviews won’t tell you:
- Your exact target market
- Your exact value proposition
- Whether people will adopt your solution. More on habit building and gamification later!
What they will tell you however, will enable you to eventually answer the above.
- What do people dislike about their current options (i.e. what are their unmet needs?)
- Who is currently using the next best thing — in our case, our hypothesis is users of wellness/mindfulness apps like Headspace and calm.com.
- What prompted people to use these solutions? (what are people’s triggers and how can we leverage them?)
As an app focussed on behavioural change, we have a lot of work to do to get people to actually use this app in the first place and then gain enough value to add it to the options they turn to when feeling overwhelmed and stressed.
Stay tuned! Tomorrow we’ll explore the benefits of and science behind positive memories. It’s a fascinating field that’s been used in teaching, coaching, and many other professions, and we’re eager to make it a bit more mainstream.
