Product development is challenging. Although circumstances beyond your control can affect your product’s performance, there are many things you can do to give your final product the strongest possible chance of success. If you’re building the web or mobile app, consider these eight rules:
1. Involve Real Customers In Development
To avoid creating a product people don’t truly want, involve real customers at every stage. Survey your target market for features and functionality they desire. Make sure you have real customer feedback that gives you concrete customer problems your product will solve.
2. Create (But Don’t Code) A Minimum Viable Product
The minimum viable product is a product that has just enough to make early customers happy. Creating this product is a useful goal, but find the simplest route until you have some customer feedback to iterate on so you can make improvements. There’ll be less code to alter.
3. Make Your Product More Than Marginally Better
If there is a product that already provides your potential customer base with an efficient solution to their problems, a marginal improvement won’t drive them to your alternative. Make it radically better than the status quo rather than try to syphon users for yourself with an ‘us too’ approach.
4. Streamline Your Core Product Experience
A single app or site can’t be all things to all people. Bolting additional products onto a core experience that is lacking won’t necessarily increase conversions. Make sure customers will fall in love with your core product and its ease-of-use and aesthetic first.
5. Get Onboarding Right
A simple tour is no longer the best practice for onboarding. Assist the user, instead, to achieve their first small win, according to what they want to achieve, using your product. This shows value.
6. Make Notifications Add Value To UX
Email and text notifications built into your product design can increase retention. If your notifications are useful (for example providing information that saves users having to log in to your platform), you’ll retain more subscribers.
7. Iterate Faster And Smarter
To refine and improve your product, monitor where bottlenecks are and user drop-off rates are high. Focus on testing and iterating refined versions of problem pages or processes until your whole product is streamlined.
8. Learn From Your Users
Data gathering analytics tools don’t tell you exactly what customers experience using your product. Engage with customers from their first interaction. Understanding exactly how they interact and why, what they want to achieve, will help you think like them when you iterate and enhance your product. Find out why some potential users almost purchase and abandon, so you can address and resolve their concerns automatically in your onboarding or user flow.
Need help developing a better product? Contact Interact RDT today.