The product improvements that are unsexy, non-obvious, but critically important
Why improving the small things in your product can be time well spent
We spend a lot of time speaking to our customers every day.
One of the privileges of being in a relatively small team — especially a team developing its own live chat tool — is that everyone speaks to customers every single day.
The idea — propounded by Steve Blank and others — that you should figure out what to build next by asking customers what they want has clearly gathered mainstream momentum. Customers love to tell you about the features you’re missing, or the areas of your product that aren’t living up to their expectations.
But what about the areas of your product that aren’t awful. The features that are quite good, that no one is complaining about. The areas of your product that are OK, but not great, that are quietly causing long-term frustration.
The problem with small, sub-optimal parts of the user experience is they can be small enough for customers to not need to complain about, but large enough that they erode the good-will and trust of your customers slowly over weeks and months.
So how do you balance customer feedback, your own vision, and improvements and bug fixes?
Ask the right questions
Asking customers what they want usually isn’t the best way to improve the product. If you ask me what I want for dinner, I umm and errrr and think about pasta or steak and then decide I don’t want either of those things. I don’t know what I really want.
The challenge for customer development is not that they won’t tell you want they want; it’s that they don’t know what to say when you ask them.
So you have to be a translator.
You have to be smart about working out what your customers want from you and your product.
This isn’t simply asking customers for feature requests. Smart companies are listening for hints about the experience their users want. Improving the customer experience is the most radical change you could make and the one that can really get people screaming and shouting. Rather than giving people something they say they want, make the things customers do every day better.
When thinking about where to focus our time on product development, we tend not to think about “what features could we add?” — we tend to start by asking one question:
How can we make the experience of our existing features better?
Defining better
Better is a very broad term.
Better means easier.
Better means faster.
Better means more beautiful.
Tools that do what you expect and give you a smile because they exceed expectations are better.
What common tasks are a pain for customers to perform?
“Ease to use” is a frequently employed term for selling SaaS tools.
Heck, we often refer to GoSquared as being easy to use ourselves. But whenever a customer reaches out asking how to do something that should be easy, we feel we could be doing a lot more to live up to our ‘easy to use’ promise.
During my second week, the urgency for reviewing our interface was clear. I was helping a customer add a colleague to their account — so they could both access their GoSquared Analytics dashboards.
Me: ‘Go to the home area.’
Customer: ‘What’s the home area?’
Me: ‘Oh, just click the GoSquared logo.’
Customer: ‘I don’t see GoSquared written anywhere.’
Me: ‘Oh, it’s just the G on the top left. It doesn’t actually say GoSquared.’
Customer: ‘Uh huh…’
Me: ‘Click the settings cog on the lower-right corner of the site thumbnail in the middle… and then hit sharing.’
Customer: ‘Right…’
Me: ‘And then put in your colleague’s email address. It’s really easy!’
The experience is anything but easy when you read those steps back to yourself. Sharing the product with your team should be one of the easiest things to do!
Sometimes, having to explain a process to a customer is the best way to highlight to yourself that a part of the product needs improving.
Feature requests for existing features
One of the main drivers behind the Ribbon was discoverability of new functions. This was driven by research conducted by Microsoft that indicated that a large number of most requested features for Word actually already existed in the product; the user simply didn’t know where to find it. – moobaa on StackOverflow
It’s frustrating when features we knew people loved, or asked us for, were actually there — they were just hard to find. As you add more into the product, the interface has to keep expanding. You introduce hierarchies and menus within menus. It can all get very confusing very quickly.
In the past, we’ve had settings for your personal account, for billing, for each of your sites, and for each widget in your analytics dashboard, each with its own settings cog. It’s no surprise that I had to keep explaining where our “team sharing” settings screen is.
You can often measure the effectiveness of your interface by counting the number of times customers requests features that already exist. If this happens too much, then it’s probably time to start looking at how you can improve discoverability.
No more cogs
Over the years, instead of adding more settings cogs, we’ve stopped working on new features to release improvements to existing functionality. Improvements that we believe make the product better for everyone — especially our most active customers.
Our mission is to help you understand and connect with your customers. To realise that goal, we don’t want to make GoSquared only easy-to-use but fundamentally a pleasure to use.
Sometimes the best thing to work on won’t result in a “wow” from customers – it may even go completely unnoticed. Sometimes the best thing to work on is the stuff that silently makes customers happy, without them even realising it.
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An earlier version of this article originally appeared on the GoSquared Blog.
