Understanding Users to Drive Adoption for Your Product
Jesse E. Owens II
Senior Product Manager, Digital Payments @ MasterCard
My Journey
- B.S. in Computer Science, Norfolk State University
- 12 years in B2B and B2C product development experience
- Military Defense, Investment Banking, Education & Payments
- Self-taught UX Design, Web & Mobile Development
Workshop Outline
- Why We Need to Understand Our Users
- Identify User Personas
- How to Craft User Personas
- Product Redesign from User Personas
- Q & A
Good Design
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is aesthetic
- makes a product understandable
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is long-lasting
- is thorough down to the last detail
- is environmentally friendly
- is as little design as possible
Dieter Rams, 10 Principles of Good Design
what is Cognition?
is what goes on in our heads when we carry out our everyday activities that involve thinking, remembering, learning, daydreaming, decision making, seeing, reading, writing and talking.
Don Norman, author of Design of EveryDay Things
Experiential: how we perceive, act and react to events around us.
Example: driving a car or reading a book
Reflective: thinking, comparing and decision making.
Example: new ideas and creativity
Who are our users?
- B2C (Business to Consumer)
- Age Demographics
- Financial Status
- Cultural
- B2B (Business to Business)
- Size
- Category
- Customer Base
What are their habits?
- B2C (Business to Consumer)
- Social Media Usage
- Web vs. Mobile Browsing
- Streaming Preferences
- B2B (Business to Business)
- Operations
- Reporting
- Data
When are they visiting?
- Morning
- Mid-Day
- Evening
- Weekday or Weekend
- Ad-Hoc
how are they accessing the product?
- Desktop
- Tablet
- Phone
- Laptop
User Personas
User Personas are communication tools used to define and understand a target user base for your product . They help drive product development efforts to focus on your key users rather than building for the whole world.
-
Types of Personas include:
- Marketing: contains demographic information, buying preferences, social media habits etc
- Proto-Personas: product pre-launch, no budget to conduct formal research and educated guess of your target user will guide development
- Design: user goals, opportunities, pain point and current behaviors
Data for User Persona
- Surveys
- Focus Groups
- Usability Testing
- Product Analytics
Once you have all of your data, it’s time to analyze and extract common trends / themes that will lead to key drivers for the development of your product.
How to Craft User Personas
- Visualize your ideal customer that aligns to the data collected, not your imagination
- Biographical information (name, age, gender, location, income, etc)
- Highlight the Goals , Need, Frustrations of your target customer
- Produce a narrative that gives an intuitive summary of your customer
Value of User Personas
- Management of Feature Requests
- Every time a customer makes a request, the design changes.
- Concise Customer Narrative
- Team Alignment on Design
- Remove the "self" perscribed design approach
- Avoid Scope Creep of your User
Examples of User Personas
Create Your Persona
- Go to Music Discovery Results
- You’re creating a set of personas to redesign Spotify's discover feature
- Using the data from the user survey, try to extract trends and develop 1-2 personas
- Be ready to share!
Spotify Discover Feature (Desktop)
2016
2014
Key Points to Consider
- Recommend music is based on likes, follows and recent music listening history
- Each recommendation allows the user to follow or listen to the artist directly
- Most of the recommended artist are musicians that already exist in playlist which defeats the concept of music discovery
- The sorting of the recommendations aren't clear in terms of the relevance
Spotify Discover redesigned
- Incorporate feedback from survey and current discover feature functionality
- Provide recommendations on how to improve the discover experience from your user persona(s)
- Be ready to share!
Resources
- Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by John Wiley & Sons
- Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
- The Practitioner's Guide to User Experience Design by Luke Miller
Contact Me
@JesseOwensII
Jesse Owens II
@JesseEOwensII
Thank you !
How to Understand Users to Drive Adoption of Your Product
By Jesse E. Owens II
How to Understand Users to Drive Adoption of Your Product
Users of your product need to be well understood and properly accommodated to deliver value in their lives. The failure to understand the user habit(s) while using your product will result in less than desirable adoption rates and missing the mark to deliver value to the business. The focus of this workshop indented to equip product managers the tools to create delightful experiences through qualitative and quantitative metrics of the end user. Key Takeaways of the Workshop: Identify User Personas and its usefulness in product development, Understand how to craft user personas for your product, Understand different data collection methods to extract common themes of the user journey and Review sample survey data provide recommendations to iterate over the UX of an existing product.
