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25.3 UX

You now understand the business model and competitive strategies for your product of choice. These are fundamental for high-level planning, but at their core, they represent collective ways to discuss how your product seeks to engage with users. How will it solve problems for its users? How will it provide experiences that are valuable and delightful? How will it generate revenue from users? How will it keep them using your product?

At this point in the process, you will dive into the hands-on work of product management, and establish a profound understanding of your users. Then, you'll identify and define a user problem, and come up with ideas for improving the product to solve it.

Dig into your product​

If you are working on an established product, consider its history. What is the company's relationship with the user audience? How did the product evolve? What was the initial MVP? Did the company pivot in a new direction? The answers to these questions can teach you a lot about the value proposition and product market fit.

Analyze all of the following metrics:

  • The primary user flows and potential pain points
  • Significant points where users might "fall out of the funnel"
  • How ethical, security, and privacy concerns come into play with this product

With these points in mind, you can delve into understanding the product's user personas and audience segments.

Do User Research​

Every product will have different methods that are appropriate for user research, but as a rule, it is recommended that you use all of the methods reviewed earlier in the program, including user interviews and a digital survey.

Be strategic in how you approach the survey and the interviews. Which will you do first? Why? What information from the first users will you want to use to fine-tune the questions for the second group of users?

Consider your previous research on the product's market and competition. Does your analysis bring up any useful ideas for the interviews and survey? What demographic and psychographic information might you want to collect about your users? Learning about their life outside of interacting with your product can lead to surprising observations or an innovative direction for the product.

In this section, you are required to use the following methods to obtain user research:

  • Conduct at least four interviews with active or potential users, either in person or using video chat.
    Tailor your interview script depending on which audience the user represents. Seek to get interviews that are representative of users, but also offer a variety of perspectives.
  • Create an online survey and collect responses from at least 10 active or potential users. The survey can be specific to the product or focus on exploring behaviors of potential users. Free tools like Google Forms or the basic plan using SurveyMonkey might be helpful. You can distribute these surveys over social media or email, and ask your contacts to forward them to their contacts as well. And if you prefer to do it the old-fashioned way, typing up and printing out a survey, bringing along some pens, and grabbing classmates, coworkers, or even random people willing to help at the local library is also a workable approach (depending on who your user is)!

Running a survey with at least 10 responders is another great opportunity to use those data visualization skills. Include questions that will generate numerical data that you can analyze. Even with a small sample size, you might end up with enough data for an engaging and informative graphic. A survey is also a fantastic opportunity to capture Net Promoter Scores data (if the respondents are product users). You might also choose to run another survey later to get feedback on prioritizing and refining your product enhancement ideas.

Based on the research you collected, create one to three user personas to include in your presentation.

Assignment​

Polish your work, including a summary of survey responses, interview notes, and one to three user personas. You don't have to submit anything here, you will submit in the end.