CONNECT WITH YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER AND STREAMLINE YOUR WORKFLOW WITH A UX PLATFORM
As industry leaders in user experience research, we are pleased to offer you access to our latest white paper: The Value of a User Experience Platform For Product Managers.
Products aren’t created in a bubble. It takes the right combination of skills and the dedication to connecting with consumers on a deeper level to make a great product for your audience. This white paper will teach you the value of integrating UX into your product management process, and how it can help you implement a design thinking approach to your workflow, a solutions-based, creative process used to address consumer challenges.
This white paper will go through each step of the product management process and explain how a UX platform can make you more efficient, thoughtful and effective through each stage of development. We will show you how a UX research platform can help you understand and connect with your customers on a more authentic level, allowing you to develop more successful products. We can’t wait to show the value a UX research platform can bring to the product management process!
Table of Contents
- INTRO: Product Management with UX at its Core = Design Thinking
- The Product Manager Work Process, and Where a UX Platform Fits In
- Step 1: Discovery Phase
- Step 2: Development and Design Phase
- Step 3: Validation and Launch Phase
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Intro: Product Management with UX at its Core = Design Thinking
Products aren’t created in a bubble. It takes the right combination of skills and the dedication to connecting with consumers on a deeper level to make a great product for your audience.
With UX at the core of your product management process, you can implement a design thinking approach to your workflow.
Design thinking is a solutions-based, creative process used to address consumer challenges. Design thinking is rooted in empathy and driven by ongoing feedback, reflection and iteration.
With a design thinking approach, the following integral product management goals can be made a reality:
Developing user empathy
Ability to synthesize user research
Curiosity and gaining good product insight
Craving user feedback
Continuous improvement philosophy
Great communication
Let’s dive in and see how utilizing a UX platform can allow you to better connect and empathize with your target consumers, and save time and money throughout the product development process.
The Product Manager Work Process, and where a UX Platform fits in
UX platforms allow Product Managers, designers and marketers the ability to understand their users better by receiving real time or near real time feedback from them, in a scalable iterative process. With the many features offered by the most comprehensive UX research platforms, Product Managers can effectively find their target audience, evaluate their needs and find solutions to their problems, creating the most effective product possible with room for constant improvement.
A comprehensive UX platform also allows Product Managers to conduct all of their product research and testing in one place. These platforms offer a variety of advanced tools and options like global participant panels, easy test design, tasks and questions, and intuitive dashboards to analyze test results. Most importantly, with a UX research platform, Product Managers will have the data to back their strategy and design decisions.
Let’s break down the Product Manager work process, and where a UX Platform fits in.
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STEP 1: Discovery Phase
Product discovery is the initiation phase where the Product Manager talks to customers, listens to their feedback and pays attention to customers using competing products. The main goal is to obtain, validate and implement customer feedback in a scalable iterative fashion.
Before beginning the design phase of a product, Product Managers can use a user experience research platform to hone in on the problem they are trying to solve, and figure out who exactly the product will be geared toward.
Let’s discuss how a UX platform can help you find your target audience and address their biggest product pain points.
WHAT PROBLEM ARE WE SOLVING?
Before spending any money on design and development of your product, as a Product Manager, it is important to discern what problem or inconvenience your product will aim to solve.
A UX research platform can help you hone in on this problem by communicating directly with consumers via moderated or unmoderated interviews.
With advanced user experience research platforms, you can schedule moderated or unmoderated interviews with your test participants in minutes from your own pool of participants, the participant panel of the platform itself, or a 3rd party panel.
When conducting moderated sessions, it is best to choose a platform that allows for “invisible” observers to observe participant interviews, so as not to intimidate participants and inadvertently tarnish your data.
This will allow your entire product team to gain insights and takeaways on what consumers consider their biggest pain point with competing products, or a previous version of your own product.
Some examples of open-ended questions you can ask your participants during such a UX test are:
“How would you describe your experience of using XYZ product?”
Or:
“How do you envision the future of XYZ product?”
With the most advanced platforms, your participants will be video recorded in a picture-in-picture format during tests, giving you additional, non-verbal cues into how they are feeling.
Another UX tool that allows you to discover your customers’ biggest pain points is a quantitative survey. The most advanced platforms integrate both quantitative and qualitative user research capabilities. The questions that appear in quantitative surveys allow for degrees of opinion, giving you greater insight into your customers’ feelings toward your product and competing products.
WHO ARE WE SOLVING IT FOR AND WHY?
As a Product Manager, it is important to truly understand and empathize with the users who need your product the most. Using an advanced UX research platform with a large global panel will offer you access to a set of diverse test participants from all over the world, making it easy to find and test people who match your target audience.
Some UX research platforms also offer custom recruitment services in case you’d like to test target persona outside of their participant panel.
Whether you want to target your clients, competitors’ clients, or similar industry workers, with an integrated UX research platform and global participant panel, you can be sure to reach the people that matter most to you and learn more about where their needs lie.
To further narrow down and discern who your target audience should be, some UX research platforms allow you to implement customized screener questions at the beginning of your UX tests. Screener questions either qualify or disqualify respondents from taking your test depending on how they answer. Screener questions can also be used to sort participants into segments, which comes in handy when you’re looking to compare one or more groups of people.
It is important to design the screener questions in such a way that potential participants answering do not know what you are looking for, so as to avoid them gaming the system. Advanced platforms will use techniques such as IP verification and QA review of every result, as well as including a webcam view of each session in order to avoid “Professional Testers.”
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STEP 2:
Development and Design Phase
The development and design phase of a Product Manager’s work process is when potential solutions to the customers’ problems are being built out and tested in low-fidelity prototypes. Using the data gathered during the discovery phase, Product Managers can use a UX tool during the development and design phase to test out some possible product prototypes and determine whether they are the right solutions for their customers’ needs.
Let’s dive into how a UX platform can help you discover and test potential product solutions for your customers.and implement customer feedback in a scalable iterative fashion.
WHAT ARE SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THIS CONSUMER PROBLEM?
Testing during the development and design stages is more cost-effective in the long run. Conducting usability tests allows you to put your low-fidelity prototypes in front of real users to identify usability issues, gather insights, and inform future iterations.
Incorporating usability tests and other UX research methodologies ensures that issues are identified early on, rather than when the product is already in the market and significant design changes are more costly to implement. Having a UX platform as a resource allows you to easily review and analyze test insights in one convenient place.
Using the insights available in the metrics section of a UX platform, you can work with your team to come up with one or more creative, preliminary solutions to your customers’ pain points.
Having valuable insights from real users in the early stages of design is important, but the findings are only effective if they are properly communicated to key stakeholders and decision-makers.
Advanced UX research platforms will record users’ interactions with your product, capture their facial expressions as they stumble through a task, and allow you to create video clips of multiple users encountering the same issue. One of the most valuable features of advanced platforms are their highlight reels and in-video annotations of key test results.
Having valuable insights from real users in the early stages of design is important, but the findings are only effective if they are properly communicated to key stakeholders and decision-makers. Advanced UX research platforms will record users’ interactions with your product, capture their facial expressions as they stumble through a task, and allow you to create video clips of multiple users encountering the same issue. One of the most valuable features of advanced platforms are their highlight reels and in- video annotations of key test results.
These convenient data sharing tools will allow you to see all of your audience’s sentiments in one place, making the development of your product solutions easier than ever.
These handy UX reporting and analysis tools offer a convenient way for you and your team to view test results, and in turn, come up with a series of data- driven product solutions. When customer concerns are recorded and compared through analytics, wider trends can be discovered.
Most importantly, video clips tend to be very convincing for stakeholders. Many people agree with Mark Twain ́s observation that there are “Lies, damn lies, and statistics”. But adding video clips of real people “tripping” on the digital equivalent of a fold in the rug is highly convincing and impactful.
HOW DO WE TEST THE SOLUTIONS WE HAVE DEVELOPED?
Using a UX platform, you can test whether or not the solutions you have created work for your customers before investing additional time and money on development. The most advanced UX platforms are compatible with many prototype platforms like Invision, Proto, Adobe, and Figma, giving you more options for testing your product solutions with customers.
Choose to initially test your solutions with low- fidelity prototypes before later testing on high- fidelity prototypes and updating your product design.
If your product involves a complex information architecture, UX platform tools that integrate information architecture tests like card sorting and tree testing can help you determine the best way to organize information as it relates with your users’ existing mental models.
CARD SORTING is a popular method for understanding the mental model of the user. Instead of organizing a website by your corporate structure, you base it on how the users think by having them sort items into categories that make sense to them.
A TREE TEST evaluates an existing hierarchical category structure, or tree, by having users find the locations in the tree where specific tasks can be completed. These UX tools are excellent ways to get into the minds of your consumers and inform the hierarchical nature of your product, thus ensuring that users will be able to find what they are looking for when using your product.
By combining both the quantitative data output of a card sort or tree test with the actual “speak aloud” recordings of participants as they make their choices you get the best of both worlds: statistically relevant conclusions with qualitative insights as to the “why” something works or doesn’t work.
Another great way to test the effectiveness of the solutions you have developed is through the various advanced quantitative metrics available via a state of the art UX platform. Quickly identify key test insights with metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), System Usability Scale (SUS), and Rating-Scale Questions.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) task calculates the percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a company, a product, or a service to a friend or colleague. You can calculate your NPS using the answer to a key question, using a 0-10 scale: How likely is it that you would recommend [brand/product] to a friend or colleague?
Respondents are grouped as follows:
Promoters (score 9-10)
are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8)
are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
Detractors (score 0-6)
are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.
The System Usability Scale (SUS) task provides a quick, reliable tool for measuring product usability. It consists of a 10 item questionnaire with five response options for respondents; from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree, with questions alternatively framed in a positive and a negative manner so as to weed out non considered replies.
The SUS allows you to evaluate a wide variety of products and services, including hardware, software, mobile devices, websites and applications, providing you with the opportunity to compare your product’s SUS score with that of competitors or a widely-used system for benchmarking purposes.
With easy and instant quantitative UX testing tools and metrics like these, you can quickly and accurately evaluate consumer sentiment to ensure your product solutions match their needs
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Step 3: Validation and Launch Phase
Using all the data you have gathered during the Discovery and Development / Design phases of your Product Management work cycle, you are now ready to begin validating your product solution prototypes, and finally launch your product.
Having a state of the art UX platform in your tool arsenal allows you to implement an agile / lean philosophy into your product development process and an Agile UX process. Test your product solutions again and again to confirm whether or not they are meeting your customers’ changing needs.
HOW CAN WE CONFIRM OUR PRODUCT IS CONSTANTLY MEETING CONSUMERS’ CHANGING NEEDS?
As a Product Manager, it is important to understand that Product development is an ongoing task – part of the role is ensuring that your product is changing and growing along with your consumers’ changing needs.
By maintaining an ongoing agile develop > test > iterate > test > iterate process, using an advanced UX testing platform, you will be able to constantly improve and adjust to changing circumstances.
This process of ongoing feedback, reflection and iteration is key to being an effective Product Manager.
At some point throughout the product development process, you may come across two potential solutions to a customer pain point, and not know which solution is better to implement.
When you are on the fence about whether you should implement one product solution versus another, you can use a UX tool to create an A/B Test with different solutions.
A/B tests consist of a randomized experiment with two variants: A and B. Typically in A/B testing, the variant that gives higher conversions is the winning one, and that variant can help you optimize your site for better results.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Product Managers who use a UX Platform can better connect and empathize with their target consumers, and save time / money throughout the product development process.
UX platforms allow Product Managers, designers and marketers the ability to understand their users better by proactively communicating with them.
With the many features offered by a comprehensive UX research platform like Userlytics, Product Managers can effectively find their target audience, evaluate their needs and find solutions to their problems, and create the most effective product possible, with room for constant improvement.
With UX at the core of your product management process, you can implement a design thinking approach to your workflow and do the following:
- Find your target customer using a global panel or advanced custom recruitment.
- Conduct moderated or unmoderated interviews.
- Test a wide range of prototypes.
- Use advanced UX tools like Card Sorting, Tree Testing, A/B testing and more to draw key insights about the customer’s mental model and product preferences.
- Use hard data and quantitative metrics like NPS and SUS to back up product development decisions.
- Create annotations and highlight reels of key testing moments to share with team members and stakeholders.
- Instantly translate test dialog.
- Retest over and over to ensure product matching changing consumer demands.
Elise Rodriguez
Elise is the Editor of Content and Communications at Userlytics. Prior to joining Userlytics’ content team, Elise worked in the public relations field, and helped develop communications materials for companies in a variety of industries, including health and beauty, travel / transportation, and sports / entertainment. Elise has her BS in public relations, and her Master’s degree in business management. When Elise isn’t writing about new product features at Userlytics, she enjoys singing and making music, yoga, and spending time at home with her two cats.
blog resources hub The Value of UX for Product Managers The Value of UX for Product Managers The Value of UX for Product Managers
