Ux — Avoid Apologies and put the user in the middle of your decisions

An important part of every company is add the customer in the middle of the decision and you as a Product person like me should be able to represent the client vision.

Below 5 tips easy and free to implement in your work day, to bring user close to your decisions.

1) Listen your client in the call center

All company has a customer center for sales or support the users, go there and just listen the call per 1 or 2 hours. It is an easy way to understand the common problem and see opportunities to improve your product or new features.

Ask to a consultant if client problem is common -use it to understand the impact.

When I do this process I try to identify personas and frequent problem to start a deep investigation.

2) Send survey of your clients

Define your question and try to be very personal, explain the purpose of the survey and why you select he/she to help you.

Use the first questions to explorer and other to validate your hypotheses. Try to be brief.

Tools: Survey Monkey, Google Forms.

3) Invite co-workers to usability test or focus group

Identify who your company has fit with the product or feature that you have been working, new co-workers are the best because they don’t have much information.

Try invite people that you don’t have much contact and explain that honest is very important to improve the product and that you won’t be sad.

4) Remote test via skype

Use your database to select the candidates, the e-mail or WhatsApp invitation, and schedule a day to talk or test something with the user. I recommend paying an incentive or giving a gif in this case, to be easy recruter the users.

If your approach is by WhatsApp, invite the client to contact the company to confirm the research. (this gives security to customers)

5) Go where your user are

If your product is about education, go to school, talk to students or teachers, if your product is about transportation take a cab to understand how your product can provide a better life or experience to your client day.

Be creative to put the user at the center of decisions.

Hope I have helped you!

Cheers,

Fernanda