“A good idea is one that solves the underlying problem”
- Marty Cagan
Netflix. Apple. Twitter. What do you think connects them?
Apart from being multi-billion dollar companies, the one thing they have in common is their initial vision to start their business – an idea that solved that one crucial problem their customers had and made these companies what they are today.
Not every company develops the perfect product right off the bat – and that’s ok. In fact, most companies only find a product-market fit through rigorous ideating and testing, or by going through the product discovery and delivery process.
What is product discovery and delivery?
As their names suggest, product discovery is the process of understanding the problem and exploring possible solutions to solve the problem, while product delivery is the actual process of deploying those solutions successfully.
While both are important, product discovery especially can help reduce the risk of developing a bad idea and wasting time and resources. In fact, the cost of fixing an error after development is 100x that of fixing it before development.
However, brands often skip product discovery and go straight to the product delivery stage - thus, relying on guesswork and gut instinct that the product launch will succeed. Conducting both discovery and delivery parallelly will help you arrive at the best possible version of the product.
How can you facilitate product discovery and delivery?
To get the most out of your product discovery and delivery process, it is important to conduct continuous user feedback to ensure you’re on the right track. Affect UX, our AI-powered DIY user research platform helps you conduct agile user research to keep up with your product development process. Here’s how:
During the product discovery stage
Let’s say you have an idea or two for a product – how do you know which is the right one to go ahead with?
Instead of relying on guesswork or past data, it is critical that you take user feedback into consideration to validate the ideas. With Affect UX, you can conduct concept testing through various types of tasks and do in-depth interviews with your users to test your concepts or ideas before putting time and effort into the production. By conducting surveys and interviews with users, you can understand your users’ opinions and perspectives towards your product or idea, so you can either get the validation you need or gain valuable insights into the tweaks you need to make to ensure a successful product.
In the product delivery stage
Once you’ve gone through the discovery process and finalized a solution that needs to be implemented, the delivery stage comes to play – How do you flesh it out and develop it? What features do you include and discard? And how can you guarantee that it will succeed once it has been implemented?
Conducting continuous user research at all critical stages of product development can help you answer all these questions and understand what users think and feel as they interact with your product. Once you get feedback on the functionality of the product, you can make the necessary changes or go ahead and prepare for launch. Affect UX offers an easy-to-use user research platform to conduct these studies, collate the user insights and share the learnings with your organization so that you can make data-backed product decisions.
Apart from pre-launch, you can also test how your solutions have worked post-deployment. By testing your live app/website, you can get real-time insights into users’ interactions with your product for a greater range of feedback.
To Conclude
Conducting user research can be quite a messy process, with data and insights scattered across different tools. This makes it difficult to collaborate with other teams and validate product decisions on solid data. Our user research platform allows you to have a single source of truth to manage all your research and collaborate with the necessary stakeholders – so you can focus on creating a kickass product!
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