Valentina
The question you choose and the way you ask it will determine how likely you are to receive answers free of bias while doing user-research interviews. UX design companies usually ask thoughtful, constructive questions in order to define customer’s real needs and preferences. It is recommended to encourage participants to think about your inquiries and seek clarification if needed.
Following are some inquiries you ought to make during the UX exploration process.
Does the average customer know what they want?
Finding out what your customers want is one thing. It’s another matter completely whether they truly comprehend what they want. Prior to comprehending a product’s adoption, one must first determine why buyers desire something and whether they truly grasp what they want. Customers may not use a product if they want it but don’t understand it. Maybe they’ll be more likely to use something if they want it and understand it. Everett Rogers, a researcher on diffusion, claims that an innovation’s adoption rate is adversely affected by complexity to a higher extent. People are more likely to use an innovation if it is clear and straightforward to grasp. Therefore, a key component of your product’s adoption is for users to grasp what it is and what it allows them to do.
How can you know whether your buyers understand your product? They can make use of it. However, there is no way for consumers to use the actual thing as long as there is no product. User experience research and design can help in this situation.
Do Customers Want Your Product?
Product managers usually are confident that everyone will want to purchase their product. They spend a lot of time and money creating the product they think their customers will want. How then can product teams determine whether customers want a product? A product manager may believe that because consumers are purchasing their competitors’ products, they will likewise buy their new product because it is in a competitive market. But what if your rival’s product has an advantage over yours?
Product managers should research to see whether people want what they are developing rather than accepting such assumptions. Direct and indirect questioning are the two methods for discovering clients’ desires. These methods can be applied singly or jointly.
How Would Customers Use Your Product?
The indirect question I previously detailed, which asked participants to describe a circumstance related to a concept or solution, is similar to this one. When polling participants about whether they would like a certain product, always look for hard data. By doing so, you can be sure that an idea or product’s worth—or lack thereof—has been shown. Always ask “why” and “how.” Permit the participants to share their own stories.
Understanding a product’s worth and the need it serves for consumers is your ultimate objective. Many stakeholder assumptions are left in place when participants are ignored and how they would utilize a product is simply taken at face value. Continue after saying, “Sure, I’d use it.” Expand on the how and why.
What Does Your Product or Idea Do for Customers?
This inquiry prompts customers to consider how a product will impact their lives. What tasks is the product performing for them that would be more challenging or impossible for them to complete otherwise? This query will seem familiar to anyone familiar with the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) paradigm. JTBD asks clients what task they have contracted a product to complete. Its objective is to comprehend the advancement that a consumer hopes to achieve with a product. We can better comprehend the jobs a product might do for the client by looking at the jobs it already performs.
What Problems Do Customers Have With the Current Solution?
Josh Furnas, Director of Product at Credit Sesame, claims that a product team’s creativity can be unleashed and chances for innovation can be found by focusing on the customers’ problems. Teams might consider more creative solutions when they learn about the issues that clients face.
There may be ways to make a new product or idea better by utilizing the drawbacks of an existing one. For instance, there can be a gap in the current solution. By filling the void, the new product can profit from this. The development of ink-jet cartridges in the 1980s significantly improved customer convenience for printing papers and replacing cartridges. The existing approach lacked a fair replacement cost, among other things. There was no less expensive option for OEM ink cartridges. Refillable ink-jet cartridges were developed due to third-party ink suppliers being aware of this and spotting a hole in OEM ink’s product-pricing strategy. As a result, ink cartridge replacement costs would go down dramatically. Customers may buy their cartridges and refill them when the ink runs out rather than paying money on replacement cartridges from OEMs. As long as they didn’t mind devoting time to replenishing the cartridges, this helped people save a ton of money.
Customers’ needs and what they’re not getting from their current solution are uncovered by asking them about their troubles with it. Product teams are encouraged to innovate by responding to this.
