Hi!Recently someone posed a question on the NextNY list about what to do after they built their product. A lot of the initial recommendations were to begin various forms of marketing campaigns to get the word out about the product. Press release, social media, contests, you name it… straight to customer acquisition mode.
Knowing that this was the first time the product was getting exposed to users there was no way I could agree with any of the advice being given. But the question remains: “you just built your product (most likely in a vacuum), what do you?”
My recommendation is to get as much feedback as possible. Identify the problem you are solving, find people who have that problem, and talk to those people. Show them your product, listen to their feedback and take lots of notes.
If it looks like people understand the concept of your product and they see a use for it, then start doing some user testing. Identify the main actions the user would take to solve their problem with your product and conduct in-person user tests to see if there are any obstacles that prevent users from using your product to solve their problem. You aren’t QAing the product, but validating the usability of the product.
If you haven’t conducted any user tests before, a great start is Steve Krug’s last three chapters of “Don’t Make Me Think”. You can download them for FREE from his site. I’d also recommend getting his books on usability and testing.
There’s even a video of a sample usability test so you can get an idea of what to expect from a session.
I’ve conducted a bunch of user tests for my own products and found them extremely helpful and easy to do without any special equipment. If you use a Mac I’d recommend trying out Silverback App. It’s a simple app that records the users screen, audio dialog of the user and tester, and video of the user.
Silverback screencast from Jeremy Keith on Vimeo.
Admittedly conducting your own tests can be a bit challenging if you don’t have a flexible schedule. Luckily there are services such as UserTesting.com that will conduct user tests for you. I don’t recommend you start with this because you want to have an understanding of what makes a user test important. It’s a combination of what you are testing and how it’s conducted. Performing some of your own tests before outsourcing them will help you get more value out of the remote tests as you will know what to expect and prepare for. Remember it’s the usability of the product you are testing, not the user.
