May 21, 2019 at 13:05How to design a product if you decide to enter the foreign market
Hello! My name is Natasha, I am a UX researcher in a company engaged in the design, design and research. In addition to participating in Russian-language projects (Rocketbank, Point and much more), we are trying to enter the foreign market.
In this article I will tell you what you should pay attention to if you have a desire to take your project outside the CIS or do something right away with an emphasis on English-speaking users, and which is better to refrain from as factors due to which you just spend time and money.
About research of a foreign audience and useful tools, about approaches to interviews and the choice of respondents, about the stages of this journey, about our personal experience - under the cut.
I must say right away that we ourselves are still in the process - we are building up our audience in Medium, write about our cases and processes, but so far we are entering the foreign market mainly with the help of familiar guys who either do their projects there themselves or know those who do. Therefore, we cannot specifically talk about the ways to enter the local market. I will describe the steps of directly studying the market, conducting research and design, if you are doing a project for a foreign audience.
At this step, there are two main ways - to conduct in-depth interviews and not to conduct in-depth interviews. Ideally - to carry out, if you have the budgets and efforts. Because in-depth interviews very well make you understand the specifics of the market as a whole and the perception of your product in particular.
If you are a little limited in funds, or if they are not for just that, then you can work without in-depth interviews. In such cases, we don’t talk with users according to a pre-prepared methodology in order to find out in detail their way, identify problems, and then build the structure of the service’s functionality on the basis of this. Here the methodology of desk study of the market works (read - the use of available sources).
The result of this stage is the behavioral portraits of users and the current CJM - or of some process, or use of the product.
To create the correct portrait of the user, you need to understand the specifics of the market (especially foreign). When you communicate with real users, you can ask them questions about their experience and problems, specify how they use the product, where they stumble, what would they advise to improve and so on.
But this is an ideal situation, and it happens that this is not possible. And then you have to use the resources that are at hand. These are all kinds of forums where users of similar services discuss problems, these are collections of reviews on the ones similar to your product (and if a user doesn’t like something and very much, he won’t take a couple of minutes to write a review about it). Well, of course, there is nowhere without word of mouth and communication with friends in the subject.
It turns out that there are many sources, they are rather scattered, and this is more a quantitative search than a qualitative one. Therefore, in order to actually get adequate information in the search for portraits, a very impressive amount of information will have to be shoveled, and not the most relevant one.
We did one project for the American market. First of all, we talked with friends who moved to America, the guys told us how their friends now use similar services, what are they happy with and what problems they face. And at the top level, it helped us identify user groups.
But a group of users is one thing, and portraits, portraits of more realistic people, filled with problems, motivation, values, are another. To do this, we additionally analyzed tons of reviews about similar products, questions and answers about data protection and other problems on the forums.
Firstly, you can use specialized services of questions and answers, such as Quora and the like. Secondly, you can (and should) use what the user himself will use for search - Google. For example, you do a service to protect data, and clog up queries that an upset user can pin in when problems arise. The output is a list of sites and forums where the audience you need lives and discusses similar problems.
Don’t forget to use Google’s advertising tools to analyze the frequency of use of certain keywords and understand how relevant the problem is. And you need to analyze not only the questions that users ask in such forums, but also the answers - how complete they are, whether they solve the problem or not. It is also important to look at this in terms of time, if you are doing a more or less technologically advanced service, then questions and feedback over two years old can already be considered outdated information.
In general, the criterion for the freshness of such information is highly dependent on the industry. If this is something that is changing dynamically (the same fintech), then a year and a half is still fresh. If this is something a little more conservative, like certain aspects of tax or insurance legislation around which you want to build your product, then the forum branches of two years ago will still work.
In general, we have collected information. What's next?
An example of analyzing information on one of the queries.
Further, all these reviews, queries in the search engine, questions and answers on the forums are divided into groups, are reduced to certain common denominators, which help fill portraits with life experience and details.
There is still a very important thing. If you are involved in prototyping, interfaces, research and more, then you already have experience. A good experience that allows you to do your job well.
Here you have to forget about him. At all. When you work with a different culture, make products for people with a different mentality, use the data that you have collected, but not your own experience, disconnect from it.
Why is it important. In the case of a VPN service - what is our usual audience of such products? That's right, people who need to bypass the blocking of some site, which for various reasons is now inaccessible from the Russian Federation. Well, IT people and people are more or less in the topic that you need to raise the tunnel for work or something.
And here’s what appeared in the portraits of American users - “Worried Mother”. That is, there VPN is one of the tools with which mom solves security problems. She is worried about her children and does not want to give a potential attacker the opportunity to track their location or gain access to data and activity on the network. And there are many similar requests from users of this category, which allows us to select them in the portrait.
Yes, she doesn’t quite look like a preoccupied mother of 40 years, but we are already tortured to look for a suitable photo on the drains
What does “Concerned Mother” usually look like for mobile applications in our country? Hardly the same. Rather, it will be a person who is actively sitting in parental chats and resenting the fact that it seems like they handed over money to linoleum a month ago, and tomorrow again it is necessary. Pretty far from VPN, in general.
Could we have such a portrait in principle? Not. And if we were to build on experience and not study the market, we would have missed the appearance of such a portrait on it.
A behavioral portrait is a thing that is usually formed after research, this is a logical next step. But in fact, at the stage of research, you can benefit from building a service and understand how people will behave with it. You can immediately highlight the main unique product offerings, which will attract a set of portraits. You begin to understand what kind of fears and distrust people have, what sources they trust in solving problems, and so on. All this helps, among other things, to form a textual presentation of the material - you can immediately understand which phrases to use on the landing page of your product. And what is also important - which phrases are definitely not worth using.
Speaking of phrases.
We did one project with an orientation directly to the American market, not only for IT specialists, but also for ordinary users. This means that the textual presentation should be such that everyone understands and accepts it normally - both IT and non-IT specialists, so that a person without some kind of technical background can understand why he needs this product and how to use it, how it will solve problems.
Here we conducted in-depth studies, this is a standard methodology, you highlight the main characteristics of user groups. But there are problems. For example, with a recruit. A foreign user for research costs twice as much as a Russian recruit. And only money would be okay - you have to be prepared for the fact that the recruit will be palm off for research not for the American user you need, but for those who recently came to live from Russia to America. Which completely knocks down the scope of research.
Therefore, it is necessary to carefully discuss all the conditions and exceptions - which user is needed for research, how many years he should spend in America and so on. Therefore, in addition to the usual characteristics for the study, it is necessary to enter more detailed requirements for the respondent in terms of the country itself. Here you can directly prescribe that you are looking for people with such characteristics and interests, while they should not be immigrants, should not speak Russian and so on. If this is not noted immediately, then the recruit will follow the path of least resistance and will drive you to study former compatriots. It is, of course, good, but it will lower the quality of research - you are making a product that is targeted specifically at Americans.
CJM based on data analysis - an existing process to solve the problem of data protection in the US and EU
With language, too, is not so simple. We know English well, but we can still miss some points just because we are not speakers. And if you make the product not in English, but in some other language, it is still more difficult. Hiring a foreign freelancer-inspector is not an option. Somehow we took a translator from Thai to work. Good experience. Now we know for sure that we will not do this anymore. It took us 3 times more time, we collected 5 times less information. It works like a broken phone - half of the information is lost, another half does not reach, there is no time left to deepen the questions. When you have a breakthrough in your free time and nowhere to put up money - that’s it.
Therefore, in such cases, when you are preparing something for a similar market, it also helps to study questions in English - its versatility makes the same English-speaking resources the main source of information for such countries. As a result, you can successfully obtain portraits, and CJM, which the user goes through, and actions inside each stage, and problems.
CJM, based on a full-fledged study, is one of the portraits of B2B exporters, ASIA
Studying problems is important in principle, because people go to discuss a situation in which they pay money for a service, but continue to face problems. Therefore, if you make a similar paid service, but without such problems - in general, you understand.
In addition to problems, you should always remember about the capabilities of the service. There are opportunities that form the framework of your service as a whole. There are some uncritical features, additional goodies. That which can become that small advantage, because of which, when choosing from similar products, yours will be chosen.
We have portraits and CJM. We are starting to build a story map, a product part, about how the user will walk inside the service, what functions in which order to receive - all the way from the first recognition to the benefits and recommendations to friends. Here we are working on the flow of information, from landing to advertising: we describe in what terms and what we need to talk with the user, what catches him, what he believes in.
Then we build an information scheme based on a story map.
Part of the product’s functionality is one of the scenarios in the info circuit.
Yes, by the way, about design, there is an important trifle. If you are creating an application or a site not only in English, but for several at once, start designing with the most visual ugly language. When we made services for Americans, Europeans and Asia, we designed all the elements first in Russian, with Russian names of all elements and Russian texts. It always looks worse, but if you designed it in Russian so that everything worked out fine, then in English then your interface will be great.
The well-known feature of English works here, that it is simpler, shorter and more capacious at the same time. In addition, there are a lot of native elements and button names on it, they are well-established, people are used to them and perceive them very clearly, without inconsistencies. And there is no need to invent anything, because such an invention creates barriers.
If the interface has large text blocks, then this is all necessarily read by the native. Here you can find people on sites like Italki, and ideally build yourself a base of people who will help with this. There is a cool person who knows the rules of the language, grammar and so on - excellent, let them help with the text as a whole, help fix the little things, point out that "They don’t say like that," check idioms and phraseological units. And there are still people who are specifically in the subject of the industry in which you make the product, and it is also important that your product speaks the same language with people and in terms of the characteristics of the industry.
We usually use both approaches - the text subtracts the neutral, and then a person from the industry helps to land it precisely on the product sphere. Ideally - two in one, if the person is from the sphere and at the same time with the formation of a teacher and good grammar. But he is one in five thousand.
If you have done a good research, the most typical and used phrases and expressions will already be in your CJM and portraits.
The result is a designed prototype, a very detailed communication scheme (all errors, fields, push, emails), all this must be worked out in order to give users a product.
What do designers usually do? Give several screen states. We create a holistic experience, carefully working through all the texts. Suppose we have a field in which 5 different errors can occur, because we well know the logic of users working with these fields and we know exactly where they can make mistakes. Therefore, we can understand how to validate the field and which phrases to communicate with them with each error.
Ideally, for one team to work out your entire communication scheme. This will allow you to maintain the consistency of experience in different channels.
When checking texts, it is important to understand that there is a researcher who was engaged in the construction of a portrait and CJM, and there is a designer who does not always have the experience of a researcher. In this case, the researcher should look at the texts, evaluate the logic and give feedback about whether it is worth fixing something, or everything is OK. Because he can try on himself portraits.
And this is one of the portraits for EU financial services, created on the basis of interviews with users.
For the same service with a more creative bias.
Some are used to design instead of a prototype, I’ll tell you why the prototype is here first.
There is a person who thinks through logic, and there is a person who does beautifully. And all would be fine, but between logic and beauty, it is usually still the fact that the customer rarely provides complete TK. Therefore, we often have a prototype - this is a kind of task for analysts or those who will program the product. In this case, you can understand some technical limitations, understand how to make a product for the user, and then communicate with customers on this topic, convey to them what things can be considered critical for the user.
Such negotiations are always a compromise. Therefore, the designer is not the one who took and made the user awesome, but the one who managed to find a compromise between the business with its capabilities and limitations and desires of the user. For example, banks have restrictions that cannot be circumvented - it is usually not very convenient for the user to fill in 50 fields of payment cards, without them it’s more convenient, but the SB of the bank and internal regulations will not allow it to completely move away from this.
And after all the changes in the prototype, a design is being made that will not undergo any major changes, because you fixed everything at the prototype stage.
No matter how well we research our audience, we still test designs on users. And in the case of English users, there are also their own peculiarities.
For the simplest portrait of a foreign user, recruiting agencies charge 13,000 rubles or more. And again, we must prepare for the fact that for the money they can slip someone who does not meet the requirements. I repeat, it is critical for respondents to have a cultural code and features of the inactive.
To do this, we tried to use several sources. At first Upwork, but there were too many narrow specialists and few people in search of not the most skilled labor. Plus, everything is strictly with requests, when we wrote directly that we need people of a certain age or gender (there should be a distribution in the samples and characteristics - so many of these, so many of these) - we snatched up bans for ageism and sexism.
The result is a double filter - first you find those who meet the specified characteristics, and then with the handles weed out those who do not fit by gender and age, for example.
Then we went to craigslist. Losing time, weird quality, nobody was taken.
A little desperate, we started using dating services. When people realized that we didn’t want exactly what they wanted, they complained about us as spammers.
In general, recruitment agencies are the most working option. But if you circumvent its high cost, it is easier to stop on word of mouth, which we did. They asked their friends to post ads on university campuses, which is a normal practice there. From there they recruited the main respondents, well, someone asked colleagues for more serious portraits.
As for the number of respondents, we usually recruit 5 people for each selected user group. There is a studyNielsen Noman, which shows that even testing on groups, each of which has about 5 high-quality respondents (representative), removes 85% of interface errors.
And you also need to consider that we conducted the tests remotely. It’s easier for you personally to establish contact with the respondent, you follow his emotional manifestations, notice a reaction to the product. Remotely, it's all more complicated, but there are pluses. The difficulty is that even at the confkoll with the Russian guys they constantly interrupt each other, someone may have communication problems, someone did not understand that the interlocutor would start talking now, and started talking himself, and so on.
Pros - during remote testing, the user is in a familiar environment, where and how he will use your application with his familiar smartphone. This is not an atmosphere of an experiment where, one way or another, he will be a little unusual and uncomfortable.
A sudden discovery was the use for testing and displaying a product through Zoom. One of the problems with the product test is that we cannot just share it with the user - NDA and the like. You cannot give a prototype directly. You can not send a link. In principle, there are a number of services that allow you to connect the laces and record simultaneously the user's actions from the screen and his reaction to it, but they have disadvantages. Firstly, they work only on Apple technology, and testing should be done not only for it. Secondly, they cost significantly (about $ 1000 per month). Thirdly, at the same time they can also suddenly blunt. We tested them, and sometimes it happened that you conduct such a usability test, and then suddenly in a minute you don’t do it anymore, because everything suddenly fell off.
Zoom allows you to share the screen with the user and give him control. On one screen you see his actions in the interface of the site, on the other - his face and reaction. Killer feature - at any moment you take control and return the person to the stage you need for a more detailed study.
In general, for now this is all that I wanted to talk about in this post. If you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them. Well, a little cheat sheet.
In this article I will tell you what you should pay attention to if you have a desire to take your project outside the CIS or do something right away with an emphasis on English-speaking users, and which is better to refrain from as factors due to which you just spend time and money.
About research of a foreign audience and useful tools, about approaches to interviews and the choice of respondents, about the stages of this journey, about our personal experience - under the cut.
I must say right away that we ourselves are still in the process - we are building up our audience in Medium, write about our cases and processes, but so far we are entering the foreign market mainly with the help of familiar guys who either do their projects there themselves or know those who do. Therefore, we cannot specifically talk about the ways to enter the local market. I will describe the steps of directly studying the market, conducting research and design, if you are doing a project for a foreign audience.
Market research
At this step, there are two main ways - to conduct in-depth interviews and not to conduct in-depth interviews. Ideally - to carry out, if you have the budgets and efforts. Because in-depth interviews very well make you understand the specifics of the market as a whole and the perception of your product in particular.
If you are a little limited in funds, or if they are not for just that, then you can work without in-depth interviews. In such cases, we don’t talk with users according to a pre-prepared methodology in order to find out in detail their way, identify problems, and then build the structure of the service’s functionality on the basis of this. Here the methodology of desk study of the market works (read - the use of available sources).
The result of this stage is the behavioral portraits of users and the current CJM - or of some process, or use of the product.
How portraits are created
To create the correct portrait of the user, you need to understand the specifics of the market (especially foreign). When you communicate with real users, you can ask them questions about their experience and problems, specify how they use the product, where they stumble, what would they advise to improve and so on.
But this is an ideal situation, and it happens that this is not possible. And then you have to use the resources that are at hand. These are all kinds of forums where users of similar services discuss problems, these are collections of reviews on the ones similar to your product (and if a user doesn’t like something and very much, he won’t take a couple of minutes to write a review about it). Well, of course, there is nowhere without word of mouth and communication with friends in the subject.
It turns out that there are many sources, they are rather scattered, and this is more a quantitative search than a qualitative one. Therefore, in order to actually get adequate information in the search for portraits, a very impressive amount of information will have to be shoveled, and not the most relevant one.
We did one project for the American market. First of all, we talked with friends who moved to America, the guys told us how their friends now use similar services, what are they happy with and what problems they face. And at the top level, it helped us identify user groups.
But a group of users is one thing, and portraits, portraits of more realistic people, filled with problems, motivation, values, are another. To do this, we additionally analyzed tons of reviews about similar products, questions and answers about data protection and other problems on the forums.
Where to get useful data
Firstly, you can use specialized services of questions and answers, such as Quora and the like. Secondly, you can (and should) use what the user himself will use for search - Google. For example, you do a service to protect data, and clog up queries that an upset user can pin in when problems arise. The output is a list of sites and forums where the audience you need lives and discusses similar problems.
Don’t forget to use Google’s advertising tools to analyze the frequency of use of certain keywords and understand how relevant the problem is. And you need to analyze not only the questions that users ask in such forums, but also the answers - how complete they are, whether they solve the problem or not. It is also important to look at this in terms of time, if you are doing a more or less technologically advanced service, then questions and feedback over two years old can already be considered outdated information.
In general, the criterion for the freshness of such information is highly dependent on the industry. If this is something that is changing dynamically (the same fintech), then a year and a half is still fresh. If this is something a little more conservative, like certain aspects of tax or insurance legislation around which you want to build your product, then the forum branches of two years ago will still work.
In general, we have collected information. What's next?
An example of analyzing information on one of the queries.
Further, all these reviews, queries in the search engine, questions and answers on the forums are divided into groups, are reduced to certain common denominators, which help fill portraits with life experience and details.
Their morals
There is still a very important thing. If you are involved in prototyping, interfaces, research and more, then you already have experience. A good experience that allows you to do your job well.
Here you have to forget about him. At all. When you work with a different culture, make products for people with a different mentality, use the data that you have collected, but not your own experience, disconnect from it.
Why is it important. In the case of a VPN service - what is our usual audience of such products? That's right, people who need to bypass the blocking of some site, which for various reasons is now inaccessible from the Russian Federation. Well, IT people and people are more or less in the topic that you need to raise the tunnel for work or something.
And here’s what appeared in the portraits of American users - “Worried Mother”. That is, there VPN is one of the tools with which mom solves security problems. She is worried about her children and does not want to give a potential attacker the opportunity to track their location or gain access to data and activity on the network. And there are many similar requests from users of this category, which allows us to select them in the portrait.
Yes, she doesn’t quite look like a preoccupied mother of 40 years, but we are already tortured to look for a suitable photo on the drains
What does “Concerned Mother” usually look like for mobile applications in our country? Hardly the same. Rather, it will be a person who is actively sitting in parental chats and resenting the fact that it seems like they handed over money to linoleum a month ago, and tomorrow again it is necessary. Pretty far from VPN, in general.
Could we have such a portrait in principle? Not. And if we were to build on experience and not study the market, we would have missed the appearance of such a portrait on it.
A behavioral portrait is a thing that is usually formed after research, this is a logical next step. But in fact, at the stage of research, you can benefit from building a service and understand how people will behave with it. You can immediately highlight the main unique product offerings, which will attract a set of portraits. You begin to understand what kind of fears and distrust people have, what sources they trust in solving problems, and so on. All this helps, among other things, to form a textual presentation of the material - you can immediately understand which phrases to use on the landing page of your product. And what is also important - which phrases are definitely not worth using.
Speaking of phrases.
Language problems
We did one project with an orientation directly to the American market, not only for IT specialists, but also for ordinary users. This means that the textual presentation should be such that everyone understands and accepts it normally - both IT and non-IT specialists, so that a person without some kind of technical background can understand why he needs this product and how to use it, how it will solve problems.
Here we conducted in-depth studies, this is a standard methodology, you highlight the main characteristics of user groups. But there are problems. For example, with a recruit. A foreign user for research costs twice as much as a Russian recruit. And only money would be okay - you have to be prepared for the fact that the recruit will be palm off for research not for the American user you need, but for those who recently came to live from Russia to America. Which completely knocks down the scope of research.
Therefore, it is necessary to carefully discuss all the conditions and exceptions - which user is needed for research, how many years he should spend in America and so on. Therefore, in addition to the usual characteristics for the study, it is necessary to enter more detailed requirements for the respondent in terms of the country itself. Here you can directly prescribe that you are looking for people with such characteristics and interests, while they should not be immigrants, should not speak Russian and so on. If this is not noted immediately, then the recruit will follow the path of least resistance and will drive you to study former compatriots. It is, of course, good, but it will lower the quality of research - you are making a product that is targeted specifically at Americans.
CJM based on data analysis - an existing process to solve the problem of data protection in the US and EU
With language, too, is not so simple. We know English well, but we can still miss some points just because we are not speakers. And if you make the product not in English, but in some other language, it is still more difficult. Hiring a foreign freelancer-inspector is not an option. Somehow we took a translator from Thai to work. Good experience. Now we know for sure that we will not do this anymore. It took us 3 times more time, we collected 5 times less information. It works like a broken phone - half of the information is lost, another half does not reach, there is no time left to deepen the questions. When you have a breakthrough in your free time and nowhere to put up money - that’s it.
Therefore, in such cases, when you are preparing something for a similar market, it also helps to study questions in English - its versatility makes the same English-speaking resources the main source of information for such countries. As a result, you can successfully obtain portraits, and CJM, which the user goes through, and actions inside each stage, and problems.
CJM, based on a full-fledged study, is one of the portraits of B2B exporters, ASIA
Studying problems is important in principle, because people go to discuss a situation in which they pay money for a service, but continue to face problems. Therefore, if you make a similar paid service, but without such problems - in general, you understand.
In addition to problems, you should always remember about the capabilities of the service. There are opportunities that form the framework of your service as a whole. There are some uncritical features, additional goodies. That which can become that small advantage, because of which, when choosing from similar products, yours will be chosen.
Design
We have portraits and CJM. We are starting to build a story map, a product part, about how the user will walk inside the service, what functions in which order to receive - all the way from the first recognition to the benefits and recommendations to friends. Here we are working on the flow of information, from landing to advertising: we describe in what terms and what we need to talk with the user, what catches him, what he believes in.
Then we build an information scheme based on a story map.
Part of the product’s functionality is one of the scenarios in the info circuit.
Yes, by the way, about design, there is an important trifle. If you are creating an application or a site not only in English, but for several at once, start designing with the most visual ugly language. When we made services for Americans, Europeans and Asia, we designed all the elements first in Russian, with Russian names of all elements and Russian texts. It always looks worse, but if you designed it in Russian so that everything worked out fine, then in English then your interface will be great.
The well-known feature of English works here, that it is simpler, shorter and more capacious at the same time. In addition, there are a lot of native elements and button names on it, they are well-established, people are used to them and perceive them very clearly, without inconsistencies. And there is no need to invent anything, because such an invention creates barriers.
If the interface has large text blocks, then this is all necessarily read by the native. Here you can find people on sites like Italki, and ideally build yourself a base of people who will help with this. There is a cool person who knows the rules of the language, grammar and so on - excellent, let them help with the text as a whole, help fix the little things, point out that "They don’t say like that," check idioms and phraseological units. And there are still people who are specifically in the subject of the industry in which you make the product, and it is also important that your product speaks the same language with people and in terms of the characteristics of the industry.
We usually use both approaches - the text subtracts the neutral, and then a person from the industry helps to land it precisely on the product sphere. Ideally - two in one, if the person is from the sphere and at the same time with the formation of a teacher and good grammar. But he is one in five thousand.
If you have done a good research, the most typical and used phrases and expressions will already be in your CJM and portraits.
Prototype
The result is a designed prototype, a very detailed communication scheme (all errors, fields, push, emails), all this must be worked out in order to give users a product.
What do designers usually do? Give several screen states. We create a holistic experience, carefully working through all the texts. Suppose we have a field in which 5 different errors can occur, because we well know the logic of users working with these fields and we know exactly where they can make mistakes. Therefore, we can understand how to validate the field and which phrases to communicate with them with each error.
Ideally, for one team to work out your entire communication scheme. This will allow you to maintain the consistency of experience in different channels.
When checking texts, it is important to understand that there is a researcher who was engaged in the construction of a portrait and CJM, and there is a designer who does not always have the experience of a researcher. In this case, the researcher should look at the texts, evaluate the logic and give feedback about whether it is worth fixing something, or everything is OK. Because he can try on himself portraits.
And this is one of the portraits for EU financial services, created on the basis of interviews with users.
For the same service with a more creative bias.
Some are used to design instead of a prototype, I’ll tell you why the prototype is here first.
There is a person who thinks through logic, and there is a person who does beautifully. And all would be fine, but between logic and beauty, it is usually still the fact that the customer rarely provides complete TK. Therefore, we often have a prototype - this is a kind of task for analysts or those who will program the product. In this case, you can understand some technical limitations, understand how to make a product for the user, and then communicate with customers on this topic, convey to them what things can be considered critical for the user.
Such negotiations are always a compromise. Therefore, the designer is not the one who took and made the user awesome, but the one who managed to find a compromise between the business with its capabilities and limitations and desires of the user. For example, banks have restrictions that cannot be circumvented - it is usually not very convenient for the user to fill in 50 fields of payment cards, without them it’s more convenient, but the SB of the bank and internal regulations will not allow it to completely move away from this.
And after all the changes in the prototype, a design is being made that will not undergo any major changes, because you fixed everything at the prototype stage.
Usability test
No matter how well we research our audience, we still test designs on users. And in the case of English users, there are also their own peculiarities.
For the simplest portrait of a foreign user, recruiting agencies charge 13,000 rubles or more. And again, we must prepare for the fact that for the money they can slip someone who does not meet the requirements. I repeat, it is critical for respondents to have a cultural code and features of the inactive.
To do this, we tried to use several sources. At first Upwork, but there were too many narrow specialists and few people in search of not the most skilled labor. Plus, everything is strictly with requests, when we wrote directly that we need people of a certain age or gender (there should be a distribution in the samples and characteristics - so many of these, so many of these) - we snatched up bans for ageism and sexism.
The result is a double filter - first you find those who meet the specified characteristics, and then with the handles weed out those who do not fit by gender and age, for example.
Then we went to craigslist. Losing time, weird quality, nobody was taken.
A little desperate, we started using dating services. When people realized that we didn’t want exactly what they wanted, they complained about us as spammers.
In general, recruitment agencies are the most working option. But if you circumvent its high cost, it is easier to stop on word of mouth, which we did. They asked their friends to post ads on university campuses, which is a normal practice there. From there they recruited the main respondents, well, someone asked colleagues for more serious portraits.
As for the number of respondents, we usually recruit 5 people for each selected user group. There is a studyNielsen Noman, which shows that even testing on groups, each of which has about 5 high-quality respondents (representative), removes 85% of interface errors.
And you also need to consider that we conducted the tests remotely. It’s easier for you personally to establish contact with the respondent, you follow his emotional manifestations, notice a reaction to the product. Remotely, it's all more complicated, but there are pluses. The difficulty is that even at the confkoll with the Russian guys they constantly interrupt each other, someone may have communication problems, someone did not understand that the interlocutor would start talking now, and started talking himself, and so on.
Pros - during remote testing, the user is in a familiar environment, where and how he will use your application with his familiar smartphone. This is not an atmosphere of an experiment where, one way or another, he will be a little unusual and uncomfortable.
A sudden discovery was the use for testing and displaying a product through Zoom. One of the problems with the product test is that we cannot just share it with the user - NDA and the like. You cannot give a prototype directly. You can not send a link. In principle, there are a number of services that allow you to connect the laces and record simultaneously the user's actions from the screen and his reaction to it, but they have disadvantages. Firstly, they work only on Apple technology, and testing should be done not only for it. Secondly, they cost significantly (about $ 1000 per month). Thirdly, at the same time they can also suddenly blunt. We tested them, and sometimes it happened that you conduct such a usability test, and then suddenly in a minute you don’t do it anymore, because everything suddenly fell off.
Zoom allows you to share the screen with the user and give him control. On one screen you see his actions in the interface of the site, on the other - his face and reaction. Killer feature - at any moment you take control and return the person to the stage you need for a more detailed study.
In general, for now this is all that I wanted to talk about in this post. If you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them. Well, a little cheat sheet.
Advice
- Study the market in any case, both with the budget, and without it. Even a Google request, as a potential user of your service would do, will help to collect useful data - what people are looking for and asking, what annoys them, what they fear.
- Communicate with experts. It all depends on social capital, do you have people in your environment who can help to validate your ideas. I somehow had an idea, I was going to write an article, collect feedback and test the product, I asked 3-4 questions to a familiar expert. And I realized that it’s not worth writing anything.
- Make interfaces first in an ugly language.
- Subtract not only grammar and other, but also the correspondence of the industry in which you launch the product.