Releasing a product is a high-stakes game, especially for startups. One bad product can kill a startup before it even gets off the ground.
Traditionally, businesses used a product-first approach to development. Research and development teams would come up with an idea for a product, market research followed, and a product was designed and released whole cloth.
Modern startups are up against a different kind of market and require a new way of looking at things.
User-centric research puts customers at the center of product R&D, looking to user needs, behaviors, and feedback to drive product development. It’s a customer-centric approach that provides immediate value and prioritizes the customer experience over presumptions and guesswork.
In this article, we’ll discuss what user-centric research is, how it can benefit your startup, and how you can start putting customers at the center of your product design.
What is user-centric research?
Modern markets are saturated with competitors. Customer expectations change with emerging tech, socioeconomic upheaval, dynamic work expectations, and shifts in daily life.
User-centric research and development understands the user first and develops the product in line with the user’s needs.
It’s a process that involves understanding your target audience through market research, demographic data, and buying leads. Then, it goes deeper, encouraging empathy with those potential customers and designing and improving products specifically for them.
How does user-centric research work?
To give you a more in-depth understanding of what user-centric research is, let’s look at what it does.
To truly deliver on user expectations, user-centric research provides deep insight into your customers.
- Who they are – beyond simple demographics, user-centric research delves into the psychological profiles of your users
- Their needs – beyond just looking at pain points, user-centric research looks into the finer points of your customers’ lives. What does their day look like? How do their jobs impact them? What aspects of family life might they struggle with?
- How they use products and services – user-centric research studies how customers use products and services to improve daily life. It looks beyond customers purchasing a product and into how the customer uses that product throughout its entire life cycle
- What you can learn from feedback – user-centric research takes feedback at every stage of the product life cycle and uses it to improve existing products and future innovations
From here, you can create products based on this deeper level of insight. User-centric research begins with the customer, and your product innovation follows. You’re building based on customer needs, preferences, and usage.
You can see how user-centric research can help bring optimal value to your customers.
What are the benefits of user-centric research?
So why should you consider user-centric research instead of more traditional product development strategies?
Let’s look at the many benefits user-centric research can provide for your startup.
You’re more likely to get it right the first time
Product development and launch can be an expensive affair, and startups often don’t have the budget for failure.
An inaugural product that fails leaves a stain on your startup’s reputation. It might use up all your resources and leave you without the means to make a second attempt.
User-centric research creates products and services that are built for the people who use them. This decreases the chances of low adoption, product failures, and end-user dissatisfaction.
You’ll be most cost-effective
Startups know the importance of financial reporting. Product development is costly and time-intensive. Creating a dud means all that time and money goes out the window. This can be disastrous for startups.
User-centric research helps you understand features and designs that appeal directly to your customers. It takes a lot of guesswork out of the process, meaning less waste.
You’ll create products that customers love
In-depth user-centric research provides your startup with valuable insights into your audience. When you create products based on these insights, products that are designed purposefully around your customer’s needs, you’ve hit the jackpot.
The iterative, feedback-driven nature of user-centric design also means your products work out of the box with continuous improvement based on user feedback.
This leads to better, more marketable products.
You can start building a loyal customer base
When businesses take our needs seriously and our feedback onboard, we start to feel like stakeholders in the brands we purchase from.
This kind of relationship builds trust. If a customer feels safe turning to your brand for their needs, they become loyal brand advocates and repeat customers.
User-centric research puts customer needs and feedback at the forefront of product development.
For startups, this means a faster track to increased sales, positive brand reputation, and user-driven marketing (word-of-mouth recommendations, user-generated social media content, and good reviews).
How can you implement user-centric research to improve product innovation?
If you’re considering user-centric research to boost innovation at your startup, we’ve written a handy guide to get you started.
Empathize with your users
User-centric research starts with the end-user, not the product. Empathy is the absolute core of user-centric research.
Gather your team and ask everyone to put themselves in your audience’s shoes. Keep your customer in mind and think about their daily lives, jobs, fears, struggles, and goals.
Create a profile of this customer based on these highly personal traits. Then, innovate business ideas that will help them.
Let’s use an example.
An e-commerce retailer looking to create an e-commerce store might want to take a user-research approach. Instead of simply using a template or creating a website with common functions, they might opt for a more user-centric design process.
The first step is putting yourself in your customers’ shoes:
- How your customer’s daily life affects their online shopping habits – are they busy working parents who do most of their shopping on their phones? Might they prefer an app over a browser experience?
- How customers navigate e-commerce stores – it’s tempting to push users into behaving how you want them to behave, but consider how you navigate an online store. Generally, the first thing we do is search for a product. This makes your product search feature a potential goldmine for the user experience.
- The features users value – again, it’s tempting to rely on business buzz terms and presumptions. A shiny new AI-powered chatbot might feel like something a business should do, but is it really giving your customers what they want? Maybe they need help with something simpler, like how to forward a call. What do you look for in Ecommerce features? Many would say streamlined checkouts with different payment options and clear delivery timeframes. Prioritizing features that bring real value to users is better than innovating for the sake of it.
This is empathizing with your potential users. It removes presumptions from your thought process and helps you focus on tangible features that improve the customer experience.
Conduct market research
User-centric research blends empathy with traditional market research. It’s still important to:
- Research your competitors – what are they creating? Where are they reaching out to customers? And how can you do it better?
- Research target audience demographics – age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.
- B2B companies should research their target businesses – understand the company culture and find email addresses for companies to reach out to key decision-makers
- Look for gaps in the market – filling those gaps can make you an innovator.
Design a prototype and conduct small-scale user testing
It’s time to put what you’ve learned to good use.
You can create a prototype of your product or service fairly early on in the development cycle and on a small budget. This prototype allows you to test your product with a small user base and gain vital feedback.
To test your prototype, you can:
- Put out a call for beta testers amongst your target audience. Try posting on social media using relevant hashtags or joining web forums where your audience hangs out.
- Host focus groups where users can test your product around you. This lets you respond immediately to queries, see users in action, and identify obvious problems.
- Ask beta testers to use the product on their own terms for a period of time and log the results. This gives you an idea of how your product performs in the field.
- For developers, you can use screen sharing to observe users as they navigate your software.
This prototype testing and feedback is vital to user-centric research. You’re gaining an early understanding of how users interact with your product, how it affects their daily lives, and where it falls short.
Release your product to the wider market and gather additional feedback
You’ve honed your product prototype into a final release, and it’s finally time to hit the market.
You’re done, right?
Not quite.
User-centric research is all about striving to give customers what they want. Your product might be good, but how do you become the best on the market? Well, luckily you have an even larger pool of users to gather feedback from.
To assess how your wider audience is reacting to your product, you can:
- Conduct user surveys.
- Host more and larger focus groups.
- Schedule interviews with customers and users to get a more in-depth impression.
- Analyze social media engagement metrics like follows, likes, hashtag usage, and user-generated content.
- Analyze social media sentiment regarding your product and brand.
- Read review websites.
There are more industry-specific ways of tracking user engagement. For example, software developers can use observability to track user issues and software bugs.
Software for sales such as feedback tools and customer support services can also help you gather this valuable data.
However you choose to take feedback, user-centric research is all about evaluating how users use your product, how it fits into their lives, and how you can improve it.
Improve your offerings based on user-centric research
User-centric design means improving products based on user feedback.
It’s a continuous cycle of feedback and improvement that enhances the user experience. It makes customers the center of your design process.
To ensure the utmost user-centricity, keep that empathy going.
- How is your product already changing your customer’s life?
- What aspects are they struggling with?
- What features have they told you would improve their lives even further?
Keep your user’s POV at the front of your mind when adapting your product.
Get everyone onboard
User-centric research is a holistic approach to product design.
Traditional development often segregated teams. R&D worked on design, sales worked on outreach, marketing worked on audience engagement, etc.
User-centric research requires everyone’s input, with teams working across departments to create a unified customer experience. Each department has its own data that contributes to the whole picture. Each team member has a unique way of thinking that helps you innovate.
Let’s say you’re developing a Mailchimp alternative. Your software development team creates your service. Marketing departments entice users into trying your service. Customer service teams deal with user problems and feedback. The user experience around your new service provides different teams with different data.
Fostering collaboration and communication across departments allows developers to better understand every aspect of the user experience.
Adopt an Agile approach to product development
You might already recognize this style of product development as Agile, a software development methodology that has emerged as a powerful business tool.
Agile project management involves short development cycles and iterative product releases with extensive feedback and improvement powering the next cycle of development.
User-centric research fits into this methodology, with its focus entirely on improving products for the end-user.
Agile product development allows your teams to track consumer trends to quickly pivot development and keep up. It also prioritizes monitoring usage and utilizing feedback to make continuous improvements.
In short, adopting Agile product development can help you be more user-centric. The two complement each other well.
User-centric research can help your startup innovate
Startups are under a lot of pressure to innovate right out of the gate. If a product performs badly, a startup’s reputation and resources can suffer.
User-centric research and development can ensure your startup creates products that customers love. Implementing user-centric research can:
- Save time, money, and resources on R&D waste.
- Help you better understand your audience.
- Ensure product development that aligns with user’s needs and lives.
- Empower customers through strong products and listening to feedback.
- Help build customer loyalty.
If you want to put users at the heart of your product development, implementing user-centric research has all these benefits and more.
