humancentric block

How To Develop Products That People Love To Use

Developing human-centric products is essential to success. 

In this article, we are going to look at some helpful tips on how you can develop products, apps or websites that people love to use. By following them, you will ensure a successful product launch, enjoy improved sales, develop a competitive product, and create a loyal customer base.

4 Simple Steps To Develop A Product That People Will Buy

Developing human-centric products that people will use and love is essential for any company that wants to stay relevant. Over the years we have developed a unique process that gets results and ensures that all the products, websites and apps we produce are loved by their users. The four steps below result from this experience and you can rest assured they are tested and proven and will help you in your quest to develop products that people will use and love.

Step 1: Start With Product Discovery

Product discovery is all about understanding the user. It includes everything from user research to competitive analysis. It allows you to develop a deep understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

The most important question you should ask yourself in this phase is: What problem do we want to solve and for whom? This will help you focus on the right things and make sure you are solving the right issue.

Start by conducting user research to help you understand your target audience’s needs, wants, and pain points. Then do some competitive analysis to see what solutions are already out there and how you can make yours better.

Your research should include:

  • Competitor analysis: Look at your competitors’ products and see if you can improve their offerings.
  • User research: This can be done through surveys, interviews, focus groups, or even just talking to people you know who would be in your target market.
  • Workshops: You can also run workshops with your team or potential users to generate ideas and get feedback.

Quick Tip: 

Our CEO, Mike Saunders, in his book Humancentric, uses these three questions to discover the opportunities to products in a digital age: 

1 What context do people find themselves in?

2 How do their relationships work and define them? 

3 Where do they access their intelligence?

The answers behind these three questions will and have unlocked a myriad of innovations with and without leveraging technology. Yet they all succeed in the digital economy. If this has peaked your interest you can read his article Making Technology Human, or get a copy of his book Humancentric

Step 2: Narrow Down Your Audience

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is trying to be everything to everyone. This is a recipe for disaster because you will end up with a product that satisfies no one.

The key is to focus on a specific audience and design your product with their needs in mind. When you know your target market, you can make decisions about features, design, and even pricing that will appeal to them.

Use the data collected in step 1 to help you identify your target market. You can narrow down your audience, the intended recipient of your product, through:

User Personas

Personas are fictional characters that represent your target market. They are based on user research data and help you understand your audience’s needs, wants, and pain points.

Creating personas is a helpful way to ensure you are designing for a specific audience and not just making assumptions about who will use your product.

We use personas to help us understand and map out the user journey. This allows us to design a product that meets their needs at every stage of their journey. We also use them to empathize with our users and understand their challenges.

Jobs To Be Done

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework is a way to think about your product in terms of the job it does for the user. In other words, what problem are they trying to solve? 

For example, if you were designing a Power Drill with a 6mm drill bit, the JTBD would be “to make a 6mm hole in the wall”. This may seem obvious, but it’s essential to consider the user’s goal when designing your product.

JTBD is a helpful way to think about your product because it forces you to focus on the user and their needs. It also helps you to understand how your product fits into their lives.

At Digitlab, we run this exercise with our client often in our innovation workshops to help businesses see past their operational bias and to reflect on their customers actual needs. Here is a really great MIRO Board Template you can use to start unpacking needs statements for your customers using the JTBD Framework.

Step 3: User Journeys And Customer Journeys

Once you have narrowed your audience, it’s time to start thinking about how they will use your product. This is where user journeys and customer journeys come in.

A user journey is a map of a user’s steps to achieve their goal. It includes all the touchpoints they have with your product, from discovery to purchase and beyond.

A customer journey is similar to a user journey, but it also includes the emotions a user feels at each stage. Emotions are important because it allows you to understand how your product makes your users feel.

Mapping out the user journey is essential in product development because it helps you understand what your users need and want.

Step 4: Prototype, Test, Improve

Now that you understand your audience well and how they will use your product, it’s time to start putting your ideas into practice.

The best way to do this is to create a prototype of your product. This can be a paper prototype or a digital prototype. The important thing is that it’s something you can test with users.

Once you have a prototype, it’s time to start testing it with users. Testing is crucial because it allows you to get feedback about your product and make improvements before it goes to market.

Testing and designing should be an ongoing, iterative process. As you get user feedback, you can make changes to your prototype and test it again. This cycle should continue until you have a product that users love to use.

Follow along with the metrics. Get client feedback, use analytic tools, and A/B test different product versions.

Develop A Human-Centric Product

At Digitlab, we believe that the best way to develop a product people love to use is to design it with humans in mind. We have years of experience helping product developers design human-centric products.

Our goal is not only to create products that are useful and easy to use but also to create products that make people’s lives better. Contact us today if you’re ready to start developing a product people will love to use. We’d be happy to help you get started.

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