Reimagining scientific news (Part 1): Why we built Sparrho 4.0
Sparrho’s vision is to be the one-stop-shop for the latest scientific content. We’re about to make some major changes as we transition into Sparrho 4.0, and as Head of Product, I’d like to tell you about our journey to this point.
(And if you make it to the end of this post, I’ve included a sneak preview of the new version!)
The good news — A wide range of users found value in Sparrho 1.0 to 3.0
In early 2014, I joined Sparrho as Chief Happiness Officer, becoming our internal ‘voice of the user’ and as such was responsible for all aspects of our users’ happiness while using our discovery and recommendation platform for scientific content.
I’ve now had the pleasure of speaking to hundreds of Sparrho users, a diverse community ranging from academia (PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members) to journalists, industry professionals, investors, concerned parents, and more.
While all of our users wanted to stay up to date with the latest in science, the problems they were trying to solve were very different.
It was exciting to see that Sparrho was valuable to such varied user subgroups, which in the tech world we call personas. However, I soon realised that while all of our users wanted to stay up to date with the latest in science, the problems they were trying to solve were very different.
The bad news — A wide range of users found value in Sparrho 1.0 to 3.0
Though I saw many commonalities in their daily habits and behaviour, the reason why each persona needed to stay up to date with science varied wildly.
Motivations are important because they dictate how people think and feel when using a product.
Motivations are important because they dictate how people think and feel when using a product: is Sparrho something they only use for work? Do they find this task a burden, or is it just plain boring?
From my interviews, some stayed up to date with science to look for new ideas. Others feared missing out on the latest scoop. Some were researching a one-off story, whilst others were simply curious about the pulse of a particular field.
By trying to solve everybody’s problems, we ended up trying to do too much.
True to our principle of always prioritising our users’ needs, we continued improving Sparrho 3.0 based on feedback from each persona, but by trying to solve everybody’s problems, we ended up trying to do too much. It was time to take a step back and reassess our focus.
The goal of an early-stage startup is to find product/market fit, and given our limited time and resources, I looked to the words of Sam Altman of Y Combinator:
“It’s better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like.”
So I had to do it — I decided to rebuild Sparrho 4.0 from the bottom up
A complete redesign might seem like a drastic measure, and indeed it was a scary decision at the time. It was crucial that I collected meaningful data to build up a model of what Sparrho needed to be, and gradually I realised that this meant we needed a rebuild from the bottom up.
I’ve done a lot of User Experience (UX) research at Sparrho — everything from attitudinal studies to ascertain why people think and do the things they do (e.g. interviews, surveys etc), to extended behavioural surveys to check if people actually do what they say they do (e.g. through quantitative studies, or analysing usage data).
Below are my key takeaways for entrepreneurs and product managers who think it might be time to undertake a similarly strict assessment of their product:
- have a hypothesis — it’s important for you to be able to set meaningful goals, and this way you’ll be less likely to be overwhelmed and enter ‘analysis paralysis’
- create beta sites to experiment in isolation — sometimes it’s necessary to strip back to the basics to get an unbiased answer
- try using the Kano model — I’ve found that it’s an effective, and quick, way to understand user expectations of features
- even when you’ve built your model, continue to test your assumptions — whenever I meet current users, potential users, or respond to feedback, I’ll ask questions about whatever is bugging me most
User feedback is just the beginning
The shift in what I knew about Sparrho’s users precipitated a wider strategy decision to focus on really solving the problems of academic researchers first. I moved into the role of Head of Product, and our team set about making the necessary changes.
In my next post I will talk about what these are, and why.
Sneak preview below…
Originally published at blog.sparrho.com.
