Dear agencies: Some toolkit suggestions courtesy of Salt, Pepa & Braden. Just replace what a startup calls ‘product’ with ‘campaign idea’ (app, site, DOOH, loyalty, whatevs…)

Clickable mockups

Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. Nope. It turns out that if you string together a few simple mockups with clickable hot-spots, you can still get great feedback in a fraction of the time. 

Customer interviews

Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Specifically, go out and find the people you think will use your product and talk with them about the problem(s) you’re aiming to solve. I know you’ve heard this a hundred times. Customer interviews are like flossing — everyone agrees it’s good for you, but it’s hard to build the habit.

It’s easy to get hung up on the details: How do you find people who will talk with you? What do you talk about? Relax. User researchers have been doing this stuff for decades, and there’s a wealth of knowledge about how to do it quickly and accurately. For starters, you can write a short survey called a screener to help you recruit the right people to talk to. Then, create an interview script to help guide the conversation.

Fake doors

You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. Instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we knew we were onto something and built the rest of the feature. After a few changes like that, we saw a 3x increase in engagement.

Recon

When teams design a new product, they come to the table with all sorts of assumptions about the competition. It’s easy to look at another product and have an opinion about which parts are valuable and which parts are broken. But if you guess wrong, you might just copy a bunch of functionality that your customers don’t actually need.

So we like to think of competing products as free prototypes. We watch customers use these products and learn very quickly which features are loved, unusable, ignored, or hated. With this knowledge, we can make better decisions in product design, marketing, and sales.

Micro-surveys

Surveys are a tempting way to learn from the comfort and safety of your office chair. But designing a good survey is surprisingly tough. Whenever I talk with survey scientists, I’m overwhelmed by all the ways you can screw up a survey design and unknowingly get bad (read: useless) data. So when we run surveys, we stick to a pattern we know works well.

We put the survey as close as possible to the behavior we’re trying to study. For instance, if we’re interested in why a customer picked one of our pricing plans, we’ll ask them with a small pop-up survey in the moment, not an email that might get read days later.

And we rely on open-response questions that let us hear directly from customers. You’ll learn more from reading 100 short responses than knowing that 32 percent of users chose option B in your survey. 

Prototype with real data

Clickable mockups are a good first step, but you can learn even more when you build a prototype that integrates real data. You might be tempted to start building the actual product at this point. You might even call that work-in-progress a prototype. But it’s not. Building a real product always takes longer than you think. If you really want to learn fast, build a true prototype – one that you’re not afraid to throw away.

Site visits

Go to wherever your customers are, and watch them actually use your product. I know that sounds like common sense (or it should). But it’s too easy to think we know our customers from all the meetings, phone calls, and reports we’ve read about them. To deeply understand how people actually use our products we need to go to where they work, where they play, and where they live.