“What have you been up to these days? Seems like you were completely unaware of the fact, that I had moved to Jamshedpur 2 months back.” expressed Fizz.
Justifying myself, “You know how I never check WhatsApp group messages. Brush told me this news just yesterday as we were chatting in anticipation for today’s lunch”. “How is life in Jamshedpur”.
She narrated a story about Jamshedpur, like a traveler, exploring the surroundings. Quickly thereafter and after a little interruption from the server taking the lunch order, Fizz enquired again, “you tell me, what are you up to these days?”
Apart from all other things, I mentioned about this new habit of publishing on debduttobanerjee.com. She quickly opened up the site and scrolled down couple of times. Flipping her phone so that Fizz could show what she was seeing to the rest of the friends group, “Look what DB is up to nowadays”.
As others glanced upon the screen, I saw the top 2 articles being shown.
At that exact point in time, I knew, I had a huge problem in my product experience.
For someone who may not be keenly interested in the marketing world, shall see the first 3 articles absolutely bogus. They work in a different field altogether. They would position the product in a certain way in the first interaction itself.
But if they would have seen my article on “collective evidence, since F*up will happen eventually, at your workplace“, maybe they end up reading it sometime.
That small little reminiscence of that experience helped me understand the importance of seeing the end user using our product. Face to face and if not available at least by screen sharing.
Lets do this. I am going to start this experiment. Asking customers to come on a 30 min call and use the product, as if they were using it alone, just that the screen is shared. We want to watch the customer use our product in front of us.
As for my own product, which I am going to have to completely redesign, I feel I would need to design the product with the audience in mind.
Stories like interface, is the first section. Then it should feel like an ecommerce store. Each article shown with a $value. My board members would determine the value of that article. Which should get displayed on the front end. Task to myself – Do a thorough research on various successful ecommerce platform designs.
I shall keep you guys posted on the progress of the redesign.
Till next time. Remember, if you are building a product, see how your customer is interacting with it IRL. That is where all the answers lie.
Thanks
DB