How the user will help make the product better
The paradox of products in the modern world lies in one simple truth — it is influenced by each of its participants from the employees working on it to the end user.
And users have much more opportunities than it may seem at first glance, walking through them is not free to ask the question “And my product, in general, is mine?”
Users can influence indirectly and directly:
Support tickets
The first direct lever of influence, if you do not want to lose your users, which can not be ignored. Tickets will inevitably affect how the product looks and its functionality. There are some subtleties here, everything that comes to you in technical support can be divided into subcategories:
- Always dissatisfied-never satisfied with the product they always have something to write, regardless of how cool everything is done
- Sincere help-people who really see the flaws in your product and are ready to tell you about it and help make it better, often remain in the shadows if they are not asked about it
- Problematic — they always have something wrong, errors occur somewhere, they can not even go a couple of steps without the help of support, as a rule, a large abundance of such people indicates that there are obvious problems in the product design.
- Money issues — The abundance of questions in support regarding tariffs, payment methods, and the subtleties of switching from one tariff to another indicates a clear need to expand or rework the tariff grid to a narrower one or to inform users in more depth with detailed instructions.
The rest of the communication is usually of a technical nature and does not give the product an obvious benefit, unless of course you have closed all the bugs and a stable release on production
The eternally discontented are needed and useful!
Contrary to common practice, conversion rates are higher if the products have several negative ratings. This information surprises me to this day, despite the desire of many companies to get as many five-star reviews as possible. Research it showed that the rating of the product from 4.2 to 4.5 is the most influential on buyers during their thoughts about buying.
There is no life without reviews
It would seem that some of the users already know the product, use it daily, and their whole life revolves around it. Almost like with an iPhone. But the “Apple” developments leave hundreds of reviews, and not a single one about your solution. And we noticed a very interesting effect. If the product has no reviews, then even advertising does not help it. To attract attention, it is enough to ask existing customers to leave opinions.
Activity Map
Modern tools for tracking user behavior allow you to mark their attention literally up to a click and milliseconds. Which gives you room to adapt the products to a lighter perception. A clear example
There is a hypothesis that due to such studies, humanity better knows itself and the way of perceiving the world (read products) around it. Creating increasingly user-friendly tools.
Voting with money
The question is quite complex and will vary from product to product, but it is unambiguous. People don’t want what they don’t pay for. The best way to test a particular feature, with minimal cost, after the release, distribute the new functionality to some users for free, and offer some for a symbolic amount and monitor the activity of both groups. This approach will give you the necessary amount of materials to make a decision about the chip.
G for your product
It’s no secret that people are very talkative and like to talk about something cool or terrible at any convenient occasion. Oddly enough, this also affects our products, launching a new cycle of user influx and reinterpretation of the product, according to the needs of a new audience.
Leaving for a competitor
What nonsense, how care can improve the product. But it is when the crisis comes and the users leave that we begin to act to the maximum, cutting off the superfluous and leaving the most important and necessary.
Community around the product
Create a platform where people themselves can help to do onboarding of your product inside your company, a simple example is a group on Facebook, when there are quite a lot of them, they will form thematic groups, chats, discussions, bring problems to public view and offer solutions!
Bug hunting
An often overlooked thing and very scary for a new product. This story is more suitable for already large mature products that have closed their obvious bugs, and it is already difficult to quickly find the most painful point hidden under tons of code. Encourage enthusiasts, they are local users and good specialists, and the strongest can be recruited to your team, such personnel are usually very valuable.
Knowledge base
In complex products, users understand themselves, help others to understand and this gives rise to manuals, books, articles. A knowledge base is formed around your product, from users, for users, in a language they understand.
So
As you can see, users can influence the product in very different ways and not keep track of everything, it is definitely worth taking on one thing, putting it on the rails and developing the next aspect.
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If you want to learn more about team interaction, here is my course on Udemy. I created my own course on this topic, based on the fact that I believe that the product is built, including on relationships in the team.(https://www.udemy.com/course/interaction-with-the-product-team)
