Effective Customer Research Techniques for Product Development
Explore essential customer research techniques that can transform your product development process. This post covers strategies to move beyond basic feedback, analyze user behavior, and foster an environment where users feel comfortable sharing honest opinions. Perfect for founders aiming to create products that truly resonate with their audience.
Going Beyond Superficial Feedback
Customer research differs from introducing new features, announcing updates via Slack, or seeking superficial feedback. Such scratch-the-surface approaches could lead your company astray, focusing on internal preferences rather than genuine customer needs. If you do not want to talk to customers out of fear of their response or think you know what they’ll say, that’s a good signal that you need to talk to be talking to them even more!
Observing and Interpreting User Behavior
Through specific tasks within your prototypes (before engaging the engineering team), observe user behaviors—like forehead touching, cursor hesitancy, retinal vibration, or sighs of frustration. During this, they will turn to you often and ask, “How do I do X?” To which you’ll reply neutrally, “How might you do X?” and tell them you’re just here to observe. At the end of them completing the prompt(s), ask them open-ended questions like:
- In what ways would you change your experience if you had a magic wand?
- Was there anything you expected to find in your experience that you didn’t?
- What was frustrating about your experience?
Encouraging Candid Feedback from Users
You’ll need to encourage them to feel comfortable sharing critical feedback, knee-jerk reactions, or anything else on their mind. Typically, people will shy away from hurting your feelings, so it’ll be incumbent on you to set the stage and make them feel comfortable enough to get real candid. From these insights, generate "How Might We’s” (HMW’s) questions to guide solutions. If these solutions don’t have a 1:1 mapping to your startup product roadmap, you don’t know your customer as well as you thought you did! It’s a sign that you need to talk to your customers more.
I share these insights as a RISD and Y Combinator alum with a decade of experience, including my founding product designer role at Imgur and NUMI Co-Founder. Hopefully, it’s a bit helpful as you start your founding journey :)
