Staying connected to your usersAdam Siemiginowski

@ATSiem

These are not statements of Procter & Gamble.

Workout! Raise your hand if…

• Your team gathers and reviews user feedback.• Someone on your team is responsible for

conducting user interviews and sharing learnings.

• Someone on your team is responsible for conducting and scheduling user interviews which your team observes.

STRATEGY

Settlers of Catan

Understanding Users

=P&G’s Success

It can be yours too.

I make design choices which

affect my users.I build new services. I buy systems, and

configure new services.

• “To go and look for oneself is the best, if not the only, way to test whether the assumptions on which a decision had been made are still valid.”

• “Failure to go out and look is the typical reason for persisting in a course of action long after it has ceased to be appropriate or even rational.”

– Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

1967

• “There’s no substitute for real people using your app in real ways.”– 37Signals, Getting Real

• “Get out of the building.”– Steven Blank, The Four Steps to The Epiphany

2006 & 2005

TACTICS

Collect and respond to feedback

Goal• Enable users to share ideas, questions and

problems with you in one click• Enable users to see what other users are saying

and voting on

Tool• UserVoice– Make it easy and implement single-sign-on

Collect and respond to feedback

Chat with your users now

Goal• Enable users to ask questions and get live

support• Enable product team to ask users how they

can help

Tool• Olark

Chat with your users now

Goal• Enable users to ask questions and get live

support• Enable product team to ask users how they

can help

Tool• Olark

Ask for content in-the-moment

Goal• Enable users to offer content suggestions

when they discover outages

Tool• Email!

Ask for content in-the-moment

Goal• Enable users to offer content suggestions

when they discover outages

Tool• Email!

Speak to users where they are!

Goal• Enable users to get updates on what is new

and important about what they’re looking at right now

Tool• HelloBar

We learned with our knowledge management systems how to apply this…

This is just a start for web apps.Take these ideas and run with them.

Next up, testing for all services and systems.

Recruit users and get to know them.

Goal• Spend time observing your users, listening to them

describe their tasks as they complete them.

Tool• Use Ethnio to setup a simple screener and embed it in a

website that your typical user visits.– I recruited 211 volunteers for a 30min interview in just a few

days.– I then used Ethnio to manage the scheduling of interviewees,

along with Outlook and Webex.

When testing our research repository…We recruited with Ethnio.com

8% Response

Finding users used to be like panning

for gold!

Rewarding, but toilsome.

Now it’s easy.

So do it!

User Sensing, let’s get personal.

Add a line chart

• A customer has asked you to add a line chart with another set of data. They think it will better represent the data than a bar chart, and correlates to what they want to communicate with the scatterplot you already added. Go ahead and add a line chart to the bookmark with your scatterplot.

EXAMPLE TASK

A MORNING A MONTH.THAT’S ALL WE ASK.

• ‘User Research Friday’• Three 45min Interviews• Three Insights / Interview

EXTRA CREDITGoal• Engage your users in your design sessions, to

learn and codevelop solutions.

Tool• Sketchboard

Maxims on Staying Connected to Users

• A morning a month, that’s all we ask.• Start earlier than you think makes sense.• Recruit loosely and don’t stress, just talk.• Make it a spectator sport, for everyone.• Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the

most important problems.• When fixing problems, always do the least you

can do to ensure the problem is solved fast.

via ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy’

For the overachievers…• Lean Usability Testing at Meetup.com• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The DIY guide to

finding and fixing usability problems (Krug)• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a plan

that works (Maurya)• From Paper to Pixels: A hands-on strategy for

user-based design (Siemiginowski)

LIFE’S TOO SHORTTO BUILD SOMETHING

NOBODY WANTS.

via ‘Running Lean’