User testing. Enough excuses.
Get out of your bubble. You’ll like it.
Even though everyone knows user testing is important and getting feedback early in the product development process is critical, for some reason, we all tend to build our products in a vacuum.
I’ll go on the record saying that I’m as guilty of this as anyone. You can ask anyone who used to work with me at TicketLeap.
I’d rationalize my lack of user testing with a belief that whatever I lose out on in feedback I’m making up for with a strong gut instinct and fantastic taste.
But….that’s complete bullshit.
Everyone has an excuse…
“I’m too lazy.”
“I don’t have enough time.”
“I’m a developer. We need a product manager to do that stuff.”
“My product is too much of a breakthrough to test on users.”
“I don’t want to give away the idea.“
Everyone…
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
— Henry Ford
My go-to excuse is shame (which is a common theme in my posts). I’m ashamed of the product because it isn’t right yet. I don’t want anyone to see it and judge my work.
As I’m sure you can realize, these excuses are a waste of time and they hold us back.
This post is a quick story about how we — my wife and I, the Loveseat team — finally broke our bad habit and got some user feedback — and most importantly how that feedback helped us in unexpected ways.
We are building Loveseat — it’s a mobile marketplace for vintage and hard-to-find furniture. The app makes it super-easy to find really cool furniture for your home from anywhere. As is the case with every marketplace, it’s really hard to get started. There is a chicken and egg problem to contend with — two sides of the marketplace need to work at the same time — sellers and buyers. One of the things we are doing to overcome this is to work with sellers who are already in the business. This is where the user testing comes in.
We met with ~10 of those sellers here in San Diego to discuss Loveseat and review the app. The situation was a little unique in that it wasn’t described as user testing to the folks we were meeting with — these were just partnership discussions from their perspective. We just happened to sneak in some user testing along the way.
Before I go any further, I want to say a quick few words on paper prototyping:
For all you paper prototype folks out there, I can tell you that if we walked into these busy business owners’ shops and offices with a bunch of hand sketched paper, they would have laughed at us and thrown us out. It would have been degrading and would have killed any shot at a partnership. Paper prototypes have a place.
This wasn’t it.
We instead walked in with something much more buttoned up. We have a functional app that is about a month or so out from going live. It was enough for the users to play around with and see the vision of why they should work with us. For us, getting feedback at this juncture was perfect timing, because we still have time to change things.
Here’s what we got out of it:
- A better product — The Loveseat app was pretty good walking into these meetings. It’s even better now.
I would say that we are on the other side of the MVP spectrum. We are investing a significant amount of time, effort, & money now so we can wow our users when we launch. Getting some early user feedback gave us some humble pie on a few of our product decisions (which we are now changing), but also let us see some of that “wow” for the first time. - A motivated team — I cannot stress our surprise on this one. It was a very zen experience.
Simply put, nothing motivates product people more than getting some “wow” from the folks for whom they are designing their product. Hearing “amazing”, “fantastic”, “love it” out of our users’ mouths was like rocket fuel for our drive. I think everyone on product development teams should sit down with users regularly. It’s exciting and gives real meaning and purpose to all the work. Even on big teams, I’d argue that user testing shouldn’t be reserved just for product-titled folks…engineers should be in on it as well.
Back to our meetings…if our conversation went the other way, and we heard “shit”, “don’t get it”, “confusing” we would have had a heavy dose of reality. While I’m glad we aren’t dealing with that, I can say I’d much rather have that problem pre-launch. - Some early users — Users are key for all early-stage startups or any company launching something new. Duh!
Getting users (especially the paying kind) early in the process not only helps the product, but it also helps the likelihood that test users will become real users. They become stakeholders in the product because they have a unique opportunity to sprinkle a little inspiration into it — which ultimately ensures that they will use it when it launches.
User testing is much more than getting feedback on how a button works or if a menu is clear or not. It’s the very first moment that your product comes to life. It’s also your chance to step outside of your private startup bubble and show the world what you are working on.
No matter how scary that may sound, you should do it. It may be your most rewarding moment yet.
