No feedback? No problem! Creating lovable products

The only truth is the client success

Proper business decisions need to be based on facts, and in the software world, the only truth is the client success. Gathering customer feedback, and acting on it, is critical for a manager to be able to develop lovable products.

Unfortunately, the process of gathering feedback is often time-consuming and expensive. When direct contact with real users is out of the picture, the development team still has a few ways to better understand the user’s point of view. The goal is to be able to see the biggest pains and opportunities for improvement more clearly, even without talking to the customers.

Four Steps to Epiphany

Experiencing the product the same way as the user does is the best way for the development team to truly understand user’s real-life challenges. To achieve the most when acting without client feedback, we use these steps at SwingDev:

1. Create UX Personas. Who will be using your app? Give the user a real face and a name. Go deeper: what is Jane’s job, where does Mark live, and what are their biggest everyday pains? This will help team members to relate more with the end user. Often there are between 1–3 significant customer groups — create a UX Persona for each of them. Check this UXPin post to learn more.
2. Test it on the most popular computers or devices. What is the most popular computer or mobile device for each of your UX personas? We, as part of tech world, tend to use high-end machines which influence how we experience our creations. This is tricky because it depends on each UX Persona and often requires a lot of research. For example, if one of your selected personas is a gamer, there are current hardware stats for PC gamers avalible on Steam.
3. Check different browsers, add-ons, and operating systems. Is Google Chrome the favourite browser in this part of the world? Which Android phone is the most popular — and how often is it used? There are a lot of questions to be asked about UX personas that will help you think like an end user, which translates into better understanding into how the product will be experienced. You can find Browser Statistics collected as far back as 2002, check what people have on their iPhone homescreens, or even compare, for example, the most popular tablet vendors in Poland.
4. Outline the customer journey. If you have enough information, you can go the extra mile and draft how you imagine the persona you created will experience your product. What are the expectations, and how are they addressed by the final deliverable. The customer journey is a very elastic technique, try to experiment and see how it will fit you and your project. To learn more about it read this SmashingMagazine article and check out this template done by authors of “This is Service Design Thinking” book.

Afterlife

These steps don’t eliminate the need for implementing proper analytics and continuously engaging users to influence project development, but it makes an excellent start to the process. Seeing your creation the same way as a user is always an eye-opening experience.

But what if you still couldn’t have a direct contact with the users and want to improve overall UX/CX? Please let me know!