Three UX Must-Haves for Startups
Every startup I’ve worked with in the last two decades has been uniquely brilliant and uniquely flawed. Yet there’s a pattern to their successes and failures.
In my experience there are three big things that UX can contribute to a startup’s success, and they are often completely forgotten.
One is a little problem, the other a big problem, and the third is worse than a problem: it’s a missed opportunity.
The little problem:
Voice.
Startups need to develop a clear, strong brand strategy. Playing with brand is fun, but you need to frame the brand goals clearly. You need to understand your market and context, and craft a personality, posture, voice, tone, and aesthetic that connect with your customers. The point of your brand is to differentiate, so if you’re comfortable with your brand, it probably means you’re not innovating with it. Forget your comfort zone, make an impact.
Brand matters, and it’s not that hard.
It’s a little problem because it’s not too hard to overcome, with the help of a brand strategy expert. If you can’t hire one, then just guerrilla it: Read a half-dozen articles and posts about branding, looking especially for non-intuitive advice, and roll your own.
What you must do about branding:
- Understand your industry and competition.
- Understand your customer and their goals.
- Take a strong, different position.
- Express it with a strong, different voice and message.
Beyond the initial effort, you need to keep strengthening and differentiating your brand: You need to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry, and figure out how to dominate it.
Take two to four hours every week to read up on articles and blog posts related to your industry, target audience, and competition. Look for signs of change, then take the lead, spearhead the change, and write your own blog post about where things are going. Cross-post it, promote it, and then forget it and get back to work, until next week.
The big problem:
Onboarding.
Users start out not knowing and not caring about your product. You then have to spend a lot of money and effort to capture their attention, and get them to your site or app download page. Once you’ve brought them there, you’ll get one shot at getting them to understand, care for, and use your product. That’s called on-boarding.
The first use of your app is a performance. <- Tweet this
In theatre, the first scene is not the main part of the story… but it’s often the most important nonetheless, because it establishes trust with the audience that the rest of the show is worth watching. A boring first act empties seats.
Onboarding is hard, because in just a few minutes, you need to:
- connect with your users,
- capture their interest,
- and get them to success on the first try.
It’s a big problem because without it you lose most of your users after the first interaction. All the money spent getting their attention is wasted if you don’t keep their attention.
Done well, it feels like a fun series of minor successes leading to a big “A-ha!” moment. Follow some basic principles around how to articulate your on-boarding experience, so that you control the story of your product:
Don’t make the user think: Make them think they’re thinking. What that means is that you should introduce new concepts one at a time, building atop one another, so there is, throughout, very low cognitive friction.
Don’t make the user create: Make them fix. Instead of offering a “blank page” as a starting point, offer your best guess as to what they need, and ask them to fix it.
Don’t make the user work: Make them succeed. Ask as little as possible of the user, and immediately give them some level of success: “Congrats on filling out your profile! Here’s a discount code / free download / pre-filled template / pre-configured thingamabob…”
Spend 50–75% of your effort on the first five minutes of use.
As you begin to develop your product, don’t make the classic mistake of designing it from the inside out. Don’t design the common, everyday use of the product first, then tack on the first-use scenario as an afterthought. It’s worth instead articulating the entire product strategy to start with on-boarding: Develop a funnel for attracting and channeling in interested users, at first with the simplest of products, but with an irresistible onboarding UX.
The wasted opportunity:
User-Centered Ethos.
A friend of mine and a great entrepreneur once said:
“Do what you love well and you will find a way to make money. Try to make money without love and you’ll find misery.”
It’s pathetically narrow-minded to focus on business success. Making money is hard… except when it isn’t: Following Lean Startup principles can help you get to product-market fit very quickly, and identify a likely path to financial success.
It’s still going to be hard work. The only thing that will make this challenge easier is if everyone wants to help you succeed. And everyone will want to help you succeed only if you’re trying to do more than just make money. If you pile on a series of hard, ambitious, quasi-impossible goals, then, and only then, will the world work with you and for you.
Paradoxically, it’s only by making it harder on yourself that you’ll inspire others to help… and once you have the world behind you, the impossible might be in your reach.
Talk to users… so you can observe them.
Go talk to users, directly, in person. Develop a full set of user personas and goals, so you understand what each type of stakeholder is looking for. But beware: Users lie.
Users will lie and lead you astray, out of kindness, embarrassment, hidden agendas, social cues, ignorance, or simply difference in perspective and semantics. Some things that are crucial for you to know are obvious to them, and not worth mentionning. Some things that are irrelevant tangeants to you are obsessions for them. Some things that are taboo, or just unpleasant, are nonetheless central to their motivations and behavior… but they’d be mortified if you asked about them. So asking is not enough. You need to observe
Don’t ask them what the solution should be, but ask them to show you what their problems are. Don’t ask them if they’d use your idea: They’ll say yes just to make you feel good. Ask them to show you what they use today. Ask them to show you their office, their workplace, or where they shop… Ask, but more importantly, observe what their actual context is.
Design for one and only one user.
But then, be aware that by trying to please everybody, you will please nobody. The only way to delight your target user is to be laser-focused. Don’t design for a group, a demographic, a “type”, because good design is empathetic. Good design is based on love. And you can’t love an age range, an income bracket, or a marketing channel.
So identify the one and only one user persona that you will design for. Give that persona a name, a face, hopes, dreams, foibles and virtues. Understand her and love her, as you would a real person. Then focus all your energy on delighting that one and only one user. If you picked her judiciously, then what you designed to delight her will also please a lot of other people.
Don’t fail to innovate
It makes no sense to recreate a paper-and-pencil process on a touchscreen… yet most software is still built out of forms, inboxes, files, and other outdated metaphors. Technology is supposed to enable new solutions, yet we most often try to shoehorn old solutions into it. Henry Ford famously said that, prior to the automobile, if he’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have replied “faster horses”. Don’t build faster horses when you have the potential to build a car.
Look for the blue ocean solution. Simplify ad absurdum, then post absurdum, and think big. How can you do that? Read a lot of sci-fi.
Sci-fi novels are the new business books. <- Tweet this
Don’t become a middle-man between the user and what they want, but instead remove obstacles. Seek to disrupt rather than intermediate. Don’t do the same, because in every field, in every business, in every culture, the same is going away.
Be kind.
You’re going to spend a lot of marketing time, money and energy getting in a lot of people’s faces and facebook feeds. If you’re successful, your product will spend a lot of time interacting with your customers. Work on making those interactions useful, helpful, respectful, and insightful.
Since you’re in charge, you can reinvent the way anything is done…
…and so you should.
Seek to “challenge up” your business model: Spend some creative time looking for ways to make your product, and your business model, good for planet and people as well as profits.
Not aiming to change the world is not aiming high enough. <- Tweet this
As a startup, your odds are long but your possibilities are limitless. Play to your strengths by attempting the impossible.
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