How To Build A User Focused Digital Product

Having an idea and building a product is one thing but knowing who your users are is fundamental to building a successful product, because what’s the point in spending time and money on something that doesn’t listen or suit your customers needs?

It’s time to start thinking about your user first and weaving this into every aspect of your innovation and development process to build a product that is truly user focused. To do that, there are a few steps you need to take, which will help you keep your user are the forefront of all your decision making.

Features Are Hypotheses  

Before you can truly know who your user is, you need to do some research about them but before you dive right into researching, you need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve - this is where features are hypotheses come into play. By orienting everything around meeting the needs of users, we accept that all features are assumptions and hypotheses to test.

Assumptions

The definition of assumption is ‘something that is accepted as true, without proof’. In product development, we make many assumptions about what we’re trying to solve and who the user may be. 

When you have your idea, you will want to think of as many assumptions as possible, starting with the main problem for your user and what your product or feature will solve. What do you perceive to be their main issue and why would they want your product? It’s important to run these ideas and assumptions past your team (product manager, developers and any relevant stakeholders) through regular meetings to ensure you’re all aligned and inputting into the planning of your product. 

Once you’ve got your list of assumptions captured, you’ll need to prioritise these by thinking about what assumption has the biggest impact on your user and their requirements. You always want to be thinking about how your product will make your users' life easier and why. 

Be sure to take into consideration any timelines you have in place to ensure you’re able to test within the timeframe. 

Hypotheses

Now that you have your assumptions in place, it is time to start converting these into hypotheses. By building your digital product around hypotheses, you will be able to create a user- centred approach that will optimise your user needs and delivery of your product together. The purpose of formulating hypotheses is to have an idea that you are able to test and validate against. 
Our team uses this user-centred approach to ensure all the products they design and deliver are always answering the users needs. By orienting everything around meeting the needs of users, we accept that all features are assumptions and hypotheses to test. For every customer limitation or business problem there are myriad solutions, for every solution there are myriad ways to solve. Once you realise this it moves the mindset to discovery and product optimisation, whilst keeping the user at the forefront of what you are trying to achieve.

Understanding Your User Behaviour

When building a digital product, you need to consider the user behaviour i.e. what are they doing and how do they respond to an interactive product? This is key to understanding how you and your team can create changes in user adoption and behaviour patterns. 

So how exactly do you find and gather data on your users behaviour? 

There are a number of ways this can be done, the most popular way is to measure their interactions and user journey through Google Analytics and other 3rd party measurement tools that gives you an insight into how your user is behaving through information such as; time spent on the product, bounce rate, user sessions, session lengths and load time. We can also capture feedback on the usability of your product from your own database resources, getting to understand your direct customers needs and behaviour better.

Capturing every interaction the user has with your product is important to creating a successful, user focused experience. As part of this, we need to understand what exactly these user interactions are through the combination of usability testing and the analytics mentioned above. Analytics gives you an insight into how people are using your product, what they are interested in vs what isn’t as successful, whereas testing gives us a clear insight into the customer journey and real experience users have when trying to reach their end goal. 

It’s important to remember that you are always trying to solve a problem and add value to your users life, otherwise they are unlikely to even use your product to begin with. 

Understanding User Attitude

Alongside user behaviour, understanding your user attitude is key to knowing how your users are feeling. You need to think about what your users motivations and goals are, how they feel and reflect on past experiences, which could affect their current behaviour. What are the triggers that could change their behaviour? 

When researching your user attitude, you want to understand their personalities, goals and opportunities to deliver insights into who your users are and inform your user personas. 

What exactly is user persona

User personas are key to creating friendly and easily usable products and experiences for your customers. They are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer or user generally based on internal research you have done to understand their needs, goals and observed behavioural patterns in everyday life. 

By referring back to your users goals and motivations throughout the lifecycle of your development and design process, you’re much more likely to conceive a successful product.

Not to be confused with marketing personas, user persona identifies the people who are actually going to be using the product firsthand, with the idea that this influences the design process to make an easier, user friendly journey. 

Your user persona will provide you all the details and information you need to know about your users attitudes. 

Why You Need To Focus On Outcomes Rather Than Output

In many cases when it comes to building a tech product, people tend to focus on delivering an output quickly. It seems that once an idea is had, there is a rush to deliver without spending time getting to know the user but instead making assumptions based on what they think their audience wants. 

Instead of focusing on the inputs / outputs, we draw our attention to the outcomes and impacts of your product. By working towards the outcomes, the user and business benefits are aligned and measured against your KPIs (key performance indicators) throughout the innovation process, and in return allows you and any other stakeholders to focus on creating customer value in all of your decision making. 

By understanding the impact your product has, we can then identify any unanticipated consequences that could occur, allowing for improvement, modification and replacement of any original ideas and focus on what works and suits your end users, this is called the Innovation Loop.

Once you’ve identified your users, you then need to test your product to ensure that you are creating a product ready to market.