Mobile App Europe 2014 Notes
How to Slim Down Product Management, Gain Valuable Insights and Make Customers Early by Leaving Your Comfort Zone
Notes on a keynote by Marc C. Lange (Crowdflow) at the Mobile App Europe 2014.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
- Things what people say and what they need are different things.
- How to include the customer more into your mobile strategy
- No excuses - Mobile is made for customer development
- POP - Prototyping on Paper (clickable prototype)
- The non-technical side of customer development - getting into character
Method acting
- Impersonating the user (work, life with/like them)
- Embodiment: What might I, the user do?
Compared to your user, you know nothing about your user
So don’t ask them if they like your product
“This is so bad, I have no words for it”
##Tools
- Qualitative research with 8-12 users
- Extract what they NEED vs. want
- Care about N00bs - might use a workaround that you could make a feature
- Think beyond the words
- Get out there
- Informal interviews
- Interview in teams
- Don’t dominate - try to be weaker than your user, open them up
- OBSERVE as deeply and as long as you can before you go into talking, be unobtrusive
- Open questions - Do not ask “Do you like that feature?”
- Manage silence - encourage people to speak - shut up, give them time to breath, to order their thoughts
- Specific vs. wide-open questions - Not “What is the best movie?” - instead: “What movie you saw in the last month did you like best?”
- Important: warm-up questions
- Have a script
- Five “whys”
- Don’t pitch! - Never pitch, just do not pitch!
Not: “You will have fun!” or “It totally rocks!”
- Prototype vs. presentation
- presentation: description
- prototype: early stage
- Provide alternatives - people wouldn’t say that something is bad, they would be nice
GET OUT THERE AND GET INTO CHARACTER
##Questions asked while Q&A: