target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://bit.ly/validating-youtube">bit.ly/validating-youtube).
Change Perceptions About Research
Let’s face it—people often have incorrect perceptions and myths associated with user research. This book changes those perceptions and hopefully busts the following myths:
• Research is academic.
• Research is time-consuming.
• Research is very expensive.
• Only an elite squad of PhDs can do research.
• Research isn’t actionable.
• Research can’t help in making high-risk product design and roadmap decisions.
• Lean user research is all about A/B testing and analyzing analytics data.
Change the Source of Product Ideas
Eighty-six percent of people interviewed for this book testified that their product or startup idea came from pain they had experienced personally. For example, I interviewed a software engineer who lost track of her child at the beach and was frantic until good people helped find him. That engineer started a company that introduced an app to solve this problem. Or a young computer science student who had been coding since he was 9 years old and had an idea for a really smart way of identifying spaghetti code and decided to patent and frame it into a service package.
There’s no doubt that personal pain signals there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Many entrepreneurs are sure they have a problem worth solving due to their own personal experience. But, they often fail to recognize that an almost tangible “fact” in their mind is just an assumption that should be tested, validated, or most likely, invalidated. Figure I.4 shows what 200 product managers and startup founders told me about where ideas for products come from. Notice that user research is last with only two percent of my interviewees.
FIGURE I.4 The vast majority of ideas for new products and services come from a personal pain the owner of the idea has experienced.
Jump!
In a scene from the film White Men Can’t Jump, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez are in bed together; she is studying for Jeopardy, and he is just lying around. She turns to him and says, “Honey, I’m thirsty,” so he gets up, walks to the kitchen sink, fills up a glass of water, comes back, lies down in bed, and hands her the glass of water. She takes the glass of water, looks at it, and tosses it in his face. He says, “What the hell, what did I do wrong?” and she says, “Honey, I said I was thirsty. I didn’t want a glass of water. I wanted empathy. I wanted you to say I know what it’s like to be thirsty.”
Brad Feld describes this beautiful, little scene and uses it to explain the essence of the differences between the two—where he went to solve her problem and all she wanted was some empathy.
To understand humans, their needs, and whether products meet those needs, you too need to develop empathy. Empathy is an intentional effort of understanding the thoughts of another person while uncovering their reasoning, as Indi Young2 defines it. It’s not just being able to feel what another person feels because you have already experienced a similar situation. When you develop empathy toward another person, a future customer, you want to learn from that person about his or her needs, behavior, and problems.
CHAPTER 1
What Do People Need?
Why Is This Question Important?
When Should You Ask the Question?
Answering the Question with Experience Sampling
Other Questions Experience Sampling Helps Answer
STEP 1: Define the scope and phrase the experience sampling question.
STEP 2: Find research participants.
STEP 3: Decide how long it will take participants to answer.
STEP 4: Decide how many data points you need.
STEP 5: Choose a medium to send and collect data.
STEP 7: Set participant expectations.
STEP 8: Launch a pilot, then the study, and monitor responses.
STEP 11: Eyeball the data and identify themes.
Other Methods to Answer the Question
Until the moment Steve Jobs went on stage at Moscone Center in San Francisco in January 2007 and introduced the iPhone to the world, nobody knew they needed a smartphone. Nokia had recently sold their one-billionth phone, and it seemed people were generally satisfied with their phones. During the seven months that passed from the time Jobs held the first iPhone in his hands onstage until Apple began shipping iPhones to the masses, there was a bombardment of TV commercials in the U.S. that took a (successful) stab at creating the need.
Today, many people consider their smartphone (whether an iPhone, Android, or other) as an integral extension of their body. They don’t leave home without it. If they do, they go back and retrieve it. The reason is because they need it. This day and age, smartphones solve problems people have, save time people can never get back, and meet