Hatchery Update: Building for Relevance

Please find the latest update from Hatchery and stay tuned as we form our plans for the upcoming Mozilla Summit!

— The Hatchery Team

At WebFWD We’ve been super fortunate to have Diane Loviglio, a Mozillian and now entrepreneur herself, walk our teams through some very practical ways to get the most out of user research to ensure what feels like a burden of time becomes an infinite time-saver en route to building useful products that people actually need, want and use.

To ensure your product development efforts are fruitful, please read on and even better, research on!

  • Use your tools wisely. Distinguish between screeners, surveys and interviews. Know when the best time is to use each (if you don’t know what these are and still don’t after a little investigating, reach out to us 😉
  • Actions, not opinions. Your goal in talking to users is to elicit facts and behaviors, not opinions. Because what will matter more for your business is how people behave (e.g. whether they buy your product) more than what they say they think about it.
  • No boilerplates. Alas, as much as we want to have templates and boilerplates to help us, you do yourself a disservice when you want to start from someone else’s survey/screener/interview template. Everything you need to discover is highly dependent on your specific market, business and solution. If that is easily replicable in a boilerplate, you have bigger issues to consider.
  • Prioritize. Along these lines, you need to distill exactly what things you need to discover at the phase you are in. Depending your product, you may care about someone’s age, or gender…or not. Similarly, while your product may apply to lots of segments, you need to focus on one at the start.
  • Diverse feedback is precious. Get lots of input on your tools, even if the reviewer is not in your ‘target market.’ Because You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.
  • Be creative on reaching your target audience. Some segments are hard to reach. For example, one of our teams wants to reach kids; in this case, Diane encouraged them to see how the adults in their lives play a role in the product and reach them…especially if they have a role in deciding whether the kids use the product! Decisionmakers can be just as important as your target audience.

The fun part is, as an entrepreneur herself, Diane is practicing these herself on a regular basis. Be sure to check out her progress (and maybe get some bling in the process!) and Share Some Style. Thanks Diane!