Analyzing your product

Omitting research is like sailing with no direction. A proper user research is going to be the foundations of your product.

You can use the following methods of user research:

• Focus groups: Moderated discussion between 5 - 10 participants. You’ll learn what they believe, think, desire, and how they react to concepts.
• Surveys: Well studied questionnaire for your target audience.
• Interviews: Individual talk with the user from 30 min to an hour. You’ll learn what they believe, think, desire, and how they react to concepts.
• Usability testing: Your target audience will evaluate your product or service by testing it.
• Task analysis: Learn about ordinary users actions by observing them performing some tasks. Helps identify features your website must have.
• Personas: It’s the collection of needs and scenarios from representative users, curated for the team to help in design decisions.

With the information you gathered from the define stage and the research lets analyze and polish the most important elements of our product.

In my case, I did a mix of surveys, task analysis and personas with analytics insights.

Depending on what your target audience is, is time to transform that information into user personas. These personas are profiles of your ideal customer.

They will help to answer:

• Goals
• Needs
• Background
• Behaviors
• Age
• Gender
• Pain points
• Spending habits

Face	Name	Age	Job	Location	Full description
	Alex	34	UX Researcher	Ontario, Canada	Alex is a 34 year old UX Researcher. He lives in Ontario, Canada. He loves UX processes and his job but he would like to jump to the next step on his career and start managing a product team. He likes to communicate with different teams and plan the product strategy, although he’s not a developer he knows the basics of front-end and frameworks.
	Nicole	25	Back-end developer	Modena, Italy	Nicole is a 25 year old back-end developer. She lives in Modena, Italy. She’s constantly reading and learning new things. She has read about agile, sprints and other methodologies but she feels frustrated because in the digital agency where she works they don’t do anything of this. She feels that she could do more and apply these methods where she works but does not know where to start.
	Sandy	29	Marketer	Amsterdam, Netherlands	Sandy has 10 years working in Marketing and advertising. She founded a startup 2 years ago. She has worked with many type of clients but there is no methodology stablished in her startup, the team tries to complete requests with no direction and she feels tired and frustrated sometimes. She likes her startup but she thinks there is so much to improve.

Now that the user personas are defined, you need to know how they are going to interact with our product. This is crucial and will help you to understand each of the steps the user will follow and how will it feel.

Mapping these actions generates the following information:

• Build empathy
• Reveal opportunities
• Break down silos
• Bring focus
• Provide a common “big picture”

These are the pillars for a product to be successfully designed and developed. You must never skip this stage otherwise you could be building a product for the wrong audience and then fail.

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