Laura Klein – Introducing the User Map
User research expert Laura Klein introduces ProductTank San Francisco to her User Map tool. In this talk you'll learn the most important questions you need to answer about your customers.
User Research Tools: The Problem With Personas
Who is your product for? You should know who is buying (or not buying) and using your product. If you’re just starting out, you should have a hypothesis about who they will be. As product managers, we already know and use a lot of user research tools. The trouble is that they don’t always give us the information we need. It’s easy to make mistakes with user research tools. We can spend a lot of time working on a persona which does not actually lead to the outcomes we needed in our product. Personas can be incomplete, misleading or only describe your user rather than predict aspects of their behaviour that are relevant to your product.
The User Map
To build great products we need to know more than just who users are. We need to know about their needs, their goals, who they hang out with and where they find out about products like ours.
Laura introduces the User Map, a set of 16 comprehensive questions in five segments that will help you learn what you need to know in order to build a great product that people buy, use, and recommend. Laura takes us through each segment, unpacks what it helps us to find out and explains why this information matters to product managers.
- Channels and Influencers or How do you attract potential users?
Why it matters: Understanding the decision making and buying process can help with messaging, positioning and even user research
- Goals and Purchase Intent or How do you know someone will be a user?
Why it matters: Understanding user intent will help you know how much convincing and onboarding will be required in early user interactions.
- User and Product fit or How do you know your product will fill a need?
Why it matters: Understanding the need will help you predict which features are most important.
- Context of use or How will your user interact with your product?
Why it matters: Understanding how and where people use your products helps you to determine the platform and design requirements and keep user information safe.
- Future use: or How will your user grow and change?
Why it matters: Understanding future use helps you improve user retention.
How do you Know you got the Right Answers?
Finally, Laura emphasises the importance of validating your data. The questions are just a guide, the answers and what you do with them are what matters.
About the author
Chris Massey
With his background in technical editing, community building and product marketing, Chris' approach to product management is inherently centered around user narratives. He spent the first few years of his career working with the B2B developer products, prototyped an experimental technical publishing platform along the way, and then kick-started the Mind the Product platform. You can find him at ProductTank, or on twitter as @camassey.
