In order to get to the perfect digital product, you need to do a lot of quality research and present data in an unambiguous way. The preparatory stage includes many crucial sub-stages of digital product development, but most importantly, getting necessary information to create personas and to complete a feedback board. We will cover more of those parts in this blog post.
Before filling feedback board, do the research
Research is one of the most critical elements of user persona development. This includes identifying your target users, your existing users, potential prospects, users who may have left you, and also users of your competitors. Collect necessary information and demographics to learn as much about them as possible.
Look beyond what's at hand
Try not to build your user persona around purely demographic information. Do some exploration on what lies beyond the ‘ideal’ customer and understand the characteristics and traits, habits and routines, likes and dislikes of the ‘real people’ this persona represents.
Specify your audience carefully
Your audience panel should be filled with the demographic information you have collected in your survey. A chart would be beneficial for that matter, but if you have decided to limit answers into a narrow population you should then replace the chart with a card indicating this is what we are focused on. Try to report some information from the people you have interviewed. This act will help you connect with a real person while reading the quotes.
Motivate your user to reach the goals
Ask specific questions about the actual motivation of your user. Don’t be satisfied with assumptions as you need to get information from users’ point of view. You can ask questions like: “what are your motivations?” for something they are currently doing or “What would be the purpose?” for something they want to do.
Solve user’s problems by identifying pain points
The goal of user experience research is to solve user’s problems later with a product. And to solve a problem, we should know about it. For this part, you can ask open questions and let people enter a custom answer in your survey. Attempt to verify your assumption, you can set up a multiple check boxes answer with your assumption of what could be the problem in it and let the respondent also write the issue in their own words via another checkbox. And try to discard “time” as a possible answer to the problem.
Understand user’s mindset to find a solution
Let’s be honest – if you ask for the final solution to your people, you will either get something impossible or more of something that already exists. The aim of this stage is to understand the user’s mindset in correlation to the problem. You are trying to see what they are willing to do and what they think is a good solution. If you plan to have a paid product you can already ask how much someone would pay for a possible solution or how much time and effort they would invest in it.
Get to know your users
Moreover, until you actually interact with your customers, you cannot really know them. So segment your user base according to their characteristics and then prepare unique questions for each, schedule interviews in order to understand them and gather their feedback.
Ask them various questions in order to get quality data about their demographics, interests, social life, financial information, influences on decision-making, browsing habits and content preferences, their buying incentives, responsibilities, daily activities, challenges and, last but not least, their pain points. Such interviews and feedback can give you in-depth information about your customers, their preferences, and the kind of marketing message that will appeal to them. You can help yourself using predefined persona templates for that part.
Create a highly-targeted content
It goes without saying, the user personas help you turn your insights into actions. By this stage, you should already know what kind of marketing message what marketing message will they react to. Humor or emotion, long post or a 15-second video, messages with traditional touch or the latest sporting event.
You identify the best channels, platforms, and times to reach out to your target audience. With that, you can create precise, relevant, and compelling content for your persona.
Don’t forget to test, repeat, refine and update
To create an accurate user persona, it is highly recommended to test it against your existing user base like A/B testing your content to see if it aligns with your customer persona. Using specialized analytics tools like Google Analytics can help you test and analyze the traffic, engagement, conversion rates, and customer insights of your marketing message based on your user persona.
Testing your user persona can help you better target your audience, estimate their content consumption and how to reach them and tweak it to better align with your ‘real’ customers. Once your user personas are ready, integrate them across your teams. Testing, user feedback, and your team inputs can help you refine user personas with evolving customer requirements, behavior, and market dynamics. So, update your user persona regularly and validate them with your current customer base and customer-facing employees.
Present data objectively to maximize the research outcomes
However, it is extremely important to present data the right way. First, you need to identify the issues correctly. Then, you need to decide what to use when. Here, the selection is really vast. You can, for example, use a pie or doughnut chart to prove or verify initial ideas. Then, you can use a vertical bar or line, which is effective for showcasing evolution over a certain period. To study a market or competition in a specific field, use dot matrix. And finally utilise an infographic chart to connect your data with actual facts.
The key takeaway of planning
To sum up, the more unbiased data you manage to get from research stage and the more precisely you complete the feedback board, the more chances of success you have creating an objectively perfect digital product.
At Clover Labs, we take this stage very seriously and with utmost caution. Contact us to help prepare everything you need for planning a perfect digital product.
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