How to Make Your Users Fall in Love with Your Product?
Written by Head of Product Paula van Steijn
We all crave a little love every once in a while. Not just from our partners, family, or friends, but also from our consumers. After all, they are the ones we wake up for every day. The ones we think about in the shower. The ones we go to work for. The light in our lives. Right?
Ok, maybe not to that extent. But they are what drives our decisions. Or at least they should be. To create a product that consumers will buy, use, and love, we must put them first. It sounds simple, but in day-to-day business it’s not nearly so easy.
8 tips to put your consumers at the center of everything
- You are not your consumer
It’s easy to think of yourself as the perfect consumer of your product. And while the product might fulfill part of your needs, you are not. Thinking you are, leads to making a lot of assumptions and pet features that your actual users will not want or need. - Get to know your consumer
So if you are not the perfect consumer, who is? Find your target audience and talk to them! What goes on in their lives? Not just regarding your product, try to get an actual sense of their routines, struggles, and needs. - Validate
Even after you’ve talked to your target audience, it’s worth creating hypotheses around their needs for your product. Then, try to validate them through a prototype. Or, even better, a pretotype. - Prioritize
Ask yourself what the Minimum Viable Product of your product should be. What would you build if you had half the time you are given? Is this enough to create value for your consumer and attract early adopters? If the answer is yes, validate this! Is the answer still yes? Build it! - Set an objective for your consumer
I’m assuming you have business objectives and key results for your product. But what is the consumer’s objective? And what are the key results to measure this? Make sure you have a consumer-centered objective that matches your business objectives. After all, they are the biggest factor in success. - Make sure you have all your tracking in order a.s.a.p.
Setting objectives and key results is one thing, but tracking what contributes to your key results and quickly analyzing how you’re doing takes time. So, prioritize this and start tracking as early as you can. - Focus on outcome instead of output
With your objectives, key results, and tracking in order, you can really focus on the impact you are making. Forget deadlines, milestones, team velocity… Instead, it is the impact of your actions on your key results that you need to keep an eye on! - Keep them engaged
Doing a design sprint at the beginning of your project is great, but you can only keep your consumer in the center of your product when you keep in contact with them. So, create a group of invested consumers to have a continuous dialogue with. This can be via email surveys or face-to-face conversations — it helps you test small stuff quickly and easily.
Do you have all this in place? Awesome. Now you can take a nice hot shower knowing that you’re doing everything to provide your business with the input it needs to build the best product for its consumer. Enjoy!
