Observe Customers Interacting with Your Product…It can be surprising
Posted on December 20, 2012
Last Thursday we had the pleasure of welcoming Justin Knecht (@verticalbones) back to The Gibson Hotel for our last iGAP session of 2012. Justin has been with us before and it's always been a great session, but this year there was a swist to the tale.
One of Justin's mantras is that we need to observe real life users interacting with our products and services in order to understand how best to optimse the user experience. If we don't observe we can't possibly understand how they really interact with the product.
Okay, I hear you say, nothing new there. What was new was that this year instead of teaching the theory, and getting the group to perform some observation exercises, we decided to do a real live lab. Real people, using real products, while the creators of those products observed.
Users were asked to 'think aloud' as they tried to sign-up, download free trials, purchase a product, review their cart etc. Whilst the product creators took notes.
The results were amazing. Every single company in the room learnt something about their product and how users interact with it. Some found real road blocks, things that in an online context could mean the difference between a sale and no sale. Others found bugs, some found the flow of the sign-up, or free trial download wasn't quite as smooth as they had hoped.
They say no plan survives contact with the enemy - so once the testers are done, maybe it's time to put your product in front of some warm bodies and get them thinking aloud.
