How to solve the right problems as a product team
The story behind our colour comparison tool
Getting started
Whenever we start a new project, I remind myself to focus on the problem we are trying to solve. It helps me avoid bad cases of featuritis.
I like Lenny Rachitsky’s take on it: “Nothing is more certain to cause a project to fail than a misunderstanding of the problem you are solving”.
In this project, our team wanted to make it easy for customers to select a product on the site. How did we come to this conclusion?
Figuring out what problem you should be solving
I like to think of it as a pie, with 2 basic ingredients that I will always need when starting a new project:
70 grams of Why: This is the foundation, the crust of the pie.
The question you need to answer is: why are we doing this? This is our vision, the direction we are heading in as a company.
How do you prioritise features required for the launch of an MVP if you don’t know what’s a must do and what’s a nice to have? Not having a crust leads to confusion, conflicting priorities, and team demotivation. True, the outcome can be a delicious mess, but it will not get us anywhere near where we want to be.
30 grams of What. This is the filling of the pie.
Here there is one clear question: what major problem(s) do we need to solve as a team? Are there any big opportunity areas?
How. This is the essential equipment required to bake a pie.
The how — the team, the values, and the behaviours that we nurture with processes — is the key to success. If you bake a pie without a proper oven, you can ease sweet tooth cravings — but you will never win the Great British Bake Off.
For this project, after a few meetings and workshops with the relevant people, I had my:
- 70 grams of why: Crafting a place for makers to feel inspired, connected, and find every little thing they need
- 30 gram of what: Delighting crafters by helping them get everything they need as fast as possible
- How: Amy (designer of all things user-friendly), Dmitry (front end guru), Anton (back end mastermind), Vova (QA ninja), and the rest of the company backing us up.
Once you have this foundation, it’s all about how you serve the pie. To serve the pie in a way that delights your customers, you should understand what they need. For instance, if customers arrive to the site, and they are famished, they will probably want the pie right away. But if they want some time to settle in before indulging, giving them a pie straight away will not have the impact you seek.
Delighting our customers
To understand what your customers need, you should always start by reviewing user journeys. In this project, the results hit me hard.
1. Contrast what you see qualitatively with quantitative data
Customers were spending hours clicking between different shades of yarn. Witnessing these sessions was painful. It made me want to head on over to that customer, just so I could help them out in their decision making process. But I figured that might take a while to do with every customer!
Thanks to this first clue though, I knew where to dive in the pool of data. The deep dive opened my eyes yet again: the cases I had observed were not noise or exceptions to the rule. Users spent quite a long time fumbling between shades.
2. Carry out usability interviews to confirm your assumptions
Once you have a potential opportunity, you should always make sure it’s an actual issue by speaking to customers. My note to self at this stage is: never jump to conclusions.
In this case, we did usability interviews to understand if spending time looking at shades was a natural and pleasant part of our customer’s journey. We discovered that 100% of users had struggled with selecting the right colour of yarn in the past. In fact, they were going to great depths to solve this problem on their own.
These are some of the things people would do, to be able to choose a yarn:
- Add products to basket to compare them there
- Print products out to compare them
- Click between product pages back and forth to compare
- Open separate windows to compare
- Use our wish-list to compare
As we could see from the work-arounds customers were using, comparing products is important to them.
3. Explore the usability of a prototype with users
With this information, Amy crafted some initial design solutions. Then, with several options on the table, we had a session with Dmitry. This allowed us to understand what solutions were too complex to ever get built. With limited time, there’s no point in testing the usability of something that’s completely infeasible to actually make.
In the first round of interviews, we discovered that users struggled with our solution. They weren’t able to open the tool to begin with. Once they opened it, with some guidance, they didn’t understand how to use it at all.
Taking into account all of the feedback from the first round of interviews, we created a second prototype to test out. Remember: iterate until you get it right. Customers loved the feature the second time around. They played around with it without us asking to do so.
4. Build
When we get to developing any solution, we start with an MVP. You should start by easing the biggest headache of all. In our case, it was selecting the right colour. Focusing on this pain point first allowed us to launch the tool in record time, and get feedback fast. Once you’ve built your MVP, that’s where the true learning experience really begins.
5. Learn
Right after launching, you should always monitor performance. For instance, in this project, we kept an eye on (1)usage, (2)impact on our KRs, and (3)customer feedback. With this information, we were able to see that the tool was useful for the customers that used it, but overall adoption was low.
6. Adapt
Having access to quantitative and qualitative data allows you to learn fast, and adapt where necessary. In this project, shortly after the first launch, we created an onboarding program to increase adoption. Now, if a new user is desperately clicking in between shades, they get a prompt to let them know about our handy tool. Because of it, more of our customers have an easier time choosing what they want.
This, of course, is not the end of it. We are always learning. What works for some may not work for all. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. And that’s the beauty of the process! You create, you learn, and you evolve.
