I forgot to clarify something in my last post. My numbered posts (1, 2, ... 4.5, 5, etc.) are all one discussion thread, and then I'm throwing in some random posts whenever I have some things I want to discuss, share, ask about, etc. So, when I promise in the numbered posts that "in my next post", I'll talk about this or that topic, I mean in my next numbered post in the series. Confusing?? Ah, you'll figure it out.
So, right now, I'm considering working on a product and in the initial phases, my partner and I are interviewing potential customers to learn about their current behaviors and the problems and barriers they might encounter that our product could potentially address.
We're just getting started with a lot of these interviews and beginning to really get into them one after another. Then today, I heard Eric Ries say in one of these videos that you should measure what customers do, not what they say, and it got me thinking about our customer interviews ... (By the way, I listened to the whole Eric Ries Video series and it was pretty good. It's about an hour long but I don’t know if you can get access to it by signing up for AppSumo - I actually think some of the AppSumo emails can be worthwhile if you're considering signing up, though I haven't bought anything from them yet).
Well, first it got me thinking about my own behavior. The example is the real-time ticker at the top right of Facebook. Some people hated it when it first came, but I thought it was pretty cool because then “Twitter” becomes merely a feature of Facebook. Combine that with the fact that you can now “subscribe” to people without "friending" them (equivalent of "following" on Twitter), and Twitter becomes a mere feature in FB. I didn't think this would in any way replace Twitter, but I thought it would give Facebook an edge and introduce a whole new dimension to the most successful social networking platform.
However, a couple of months later (today), it just occurred to me that I never look at the ticker at the top right, and by "never", I mean to the extent that I completely forgot it even exists. My eyes completely skip over it even though I “said” it was a nifty feature and I was initially intrigued by it. So, what does this tell me?? I need to focus most of my interview questions on what people do in certain scenarios, and bring this even to a more concrete level of "what have they done recently, the very last time they encountered this scenario", and not ask questions that get at "what people like", because I think the latter will likely not provide me with very valuable information, especially if I myself am any indication of how people answer these types of questions ... It's just a simple insight that others have observed, and that I thought I'd share, but it really hit home when I realized my own behavior in this Facebook example: how little do we know ourselves!
However, a couple of months later (today), it just occurred to me that I never look at the ticker at the top right, and by "never", I mean to the extent that I completely forgot it even exists. My eyes completely skip over it even though I “said” it was a nifty feature and I was initially intrigued by it. So, what does this tell me?? I need to focus most of my interview questions on what people do in certain scenarios, and bring this even to a more concrete level of "what have they done recently, the very last time they encountered this scenario", and not ask questions that get at "what people like", because I think the latter will likely not provide me with very valuable information, especially if I myself am any indication of how people answer these types of questions ... It's just a simple insight that others have observed, and that I thought I'd share, but it really hit home when I realized my own behavior in this Facebook example: how little do we know ourselves!
