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It's easy to get caught up in the promise of new technologies and lose sight of the fundamental issues that make a product successful. By listening to the questions venture capitalists pose when reviewing new products we can develop a checklist to assess the viability of a new product idea.
The BBC televises a fascinating programme called "Dragons' Den" where entrepreneurs present their business ideas to 5 venture capitalists (in the USA the television show "American Inventor" has a similar format). After the entrepreneur has pitched his or her idea, the venture capitalists pose questions about the idea and each one makes a decision on whether to invest.
What I find most interesting about the programme is the type of questions posed by the venture capitalists. These are multi-millionaires with years of experience successfully evaluating products. They collectively invest millions of pounds a year in new product ideas, including many high-tech products. Most have been successful from a frighteningly young age, like Peter Jones who founded a tennis academy at 16, and some have a classic rags-to-riches story, such as Duncan Bannatyn who made money selling ice cream before moving on to nursing homes, health clubs and casinos.
So what type of questions do these people ask of the entrepreneurs? They almost always focus on questions like, "Do people want what your offering?" or "Do you know who your customers are?" Many of the entrepreneurs react badly to this. They have a grand vision for their product and don't want to answer seemingly prosaic questions.
Entrepreneurs and visionaries might not like mundane questions like these, but answers to them are fundamental in making a product successful. For example, with a web site it's so tempting to get caught up in the technologies of social networking, tagging, blogs, podcasts and wikis that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you have no customers, or that you don't know who your customers are.
Interestingly, these are the questions that usability professionals pose every day. So why not make like a Dragon, and ask some mundane questions of your new product development? You may not be able to declare, like a Dragon, "I'm out!", but you will at least know where to look to start improving your product's chances of success.
A great method for answering some of these questions is a field study. Drawing on methods from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and sociology, field studies consist of observing and talking with people in their workplaces and homes while they perform normal activities. Field studies are indispensable when you want to understand your customers better: for example, to learn the different ways they're using your product, or what features would be useful to them in future product versions.
Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on user experience including Think Like a UX Researcher. If you like his articles, you might enjoy his free online user experience course.
Gain hands-on practice in all the key areas of UX while you prepare for the BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience. More details
Until usability gets embedded in the processes of your company, you'll probably find you need to justify the investment. Fortunately, usability initiatives deliver a major return on investment: it's not unusual for usability projects to return benefits of 5-10 times their cost in the first year alone. A Business Case for Usability.
This article is tagged guidelines, strategy.
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