‘Press release’ research provides deep insights at product idea stage
If you build it, will they come? It would be nice to know that before developing a new product.
I recently tried a new technique for gauging customers’ reactions to a new product idea. I sent a press release that presented the idea as a finished tool to customers to get their feedback. The results validated our idea while also informing the product design, and — surprisingly — even the writing of the actual future press release!
To take a step back, my team at LexisNexis learned about writing press releases to illustrate product ideas from Amazon during a daylong “Working Backwards” workshop this past spring. Amazon writes press releases internally to capture their product vision, so product teams can refer to them throughout the design and development processes.
Our UX research team decided to take the idea a step further and test the press release we had written with customers to determine whether our idea was desired and deserved support. To do this, we crafted a survey. Here’s how it worked:
Setting the stage: We started by deciding what we wanted to learn from the survey. This included getting initial reactions to the press release; measuring people’s desire for the tool and its features; and getting their thoughts on how we should proceed.
Initial reactions: We shared a few paragraphs of the press release and gauged initial reactions by asking users first to list three adjectives that came to mind when they read the release, and then choose the three words from 25 “Microsoft Product Reaction Card adjectives” that best described their reactions. The vast majority of the feedback was positive — as in “exciting,” “appealing” and “time-saving.”
Likelihood of using: We then asked people to rate how likely they would be to use and learn more about the product — and why or why not. Most said they would “absolutely” or “probably” use the tool, while others would need more information. We asked a follow-up question about how likely they would be to go to a training to learn more about the tool and got an even more positive response. We asked about that training because what’s most valuable to our customers is their time — so saying they would attend was a big deal.
Positive and negative words: This survey was also the perfect opportunity to use a new survey question type: highlighting words that come across as especially positive or negative. We learned that internal jargon was a turn-off. We also learned that some of our wording — such as when we said the product would ‘take the guesswork out of research’ — offended some readers, who did not feel they were doing “guesswork” currently. We shared this information with the marketing team so they can learn from it.
Feature ratings: While we were creating this survey, we took the opportunity to gauge users’ priorities for the product and learn more about when and how they would want to use it. We asked them to allocate points across four product features, with more points going to the features they valued most. We also asked about when in the process of their workflow they would want to use this product and learned that it was earlier than we had anticipated, which led to some re-thinking about the design. Both these questions have informed the product.
Additional insights: And the last question was one we really wanted to know: What should we keep in mind as we develop this product? Nearly everyone responded to this open-ended question — both with things we had considered, and with new insights.
We came away from this study secure that our users “hope Lexis ends up making this tool.” That, along with details about how to do it the right way, made this a worthwhile research method — and one that our company is eagerly repeating with other teams.
