Episode 15: How to Build a Better Product By Better Understanding Customers | With Bear Liu

Full Transcript:

David Bain  00:03

How to build a better product by better understanding customers - with Bear Liu.

David Bain  00:13

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Hey, it’s David. How much work are you doing to truly understand who your customers are before you build your product and before you produce your content? And how does understanding who your customers actually are impact the quality of your product, and ultimately increase the success of your marketing activities?

That’s what we're going to be covering today with a man who's an award-winning podcaster, a design mentor at Springboard and CareerFoundry, and product designer at Xero. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Bear Liu.

Bear Liu  01:05

Wow, that's such a great introduction, and I’m thrilled to hear that. Thanks, David, for having me here.

David Bain  01:13

You can find Bear over at beartalking.com. So, first question, Bear: what do you mean by “understanding customers first”?

Bear Liu  01:21

This is, I think, at the core for every designer's job description. First, to understand the customer first, but sometimes it's just the things we say but not the things we do for many companies or many organizations. Because everyone will say, “Oh, we value our customers, we wish to know them.” but, actually, it can really bring some impact on your business, if you walk the walk, not only talk the talk.

That's what I mean. “Understand the customer” should be the first step - or at least should be a very important step of the whole business strategy, or the whole journey of a service or a product. That's what I'm thinking, it should raise up the importance level.

David Bain  02:19

What form does “understanding your customers” actually take? Is it about doing something like focus groups? Is it online surveys? is looking at what customers are actually doing when they're actively using your website? Is it something else I'm not thinking of?

Bear Liu  02:34

That's a good question, David. For a UX designer, or for a product designer, we do have some common best practices for understanding customers by doing quantitative research or qualitative research - which are two ways in general. Looking at surveys or data or other metrics as quantitative research, to understand their behavior and the trends, but the other way (which actually, from my personal opinion, is more important) is the qualitative research - which means by talking to them, by asking why they want to do this rather than that.

That's another way to really get insights about who they are, what they want, and what they want to achieve via using your service or product. The more we talk with them, the better we understand them, and the better value you can bring via your product, your service, or your content. This is what I mean by “understand customers”.

David Bain  03:50

You're working in an organization with 10s, possibly 1000s, of customers, obviously, you can't talk to everyone. How do you select the customers that you want to talk to?

Bear Liu  04:02

Yeah, that's also a really good question because it's always important to find the right people that you can talk to. If you talk to the right people, even with some wrong questions, you can still get the right answer. Vice versa, if you talk to the wrong people, then even the perfect questions will not give you the insights. 

For where I'm working, we have a resource for recruiting existing customers. There are a few touchpoints during their journey on using our products and sometimes, if you really want to understand a specific step or some parts of their journey, we can reach out during those touchpoints within the product - which is a really good privilege for us to do that. Not every company has that privilege.

Also, I think it depends on the business decider - their understanding about if it's an important thing. If it's a valuable thing, then they should invest time and money, and resources on doing that. If you have these, I think there are always ways to do that. At this stage, I’m probably not going into details about how to recruit those customers - those participants for interviews or testing - but I think you should have this mindset that, “If we have a better understanding of our customers, we will have better value to bring for our business.” If we see a shift in mindset to this, there'll be always a lot of creative ways to do that - to recruit customers for conversations.

David Bain  06:08

It's a great point there. You certainly need to identify the right point in the customer journey - the right point, where they're actually using your product or service, to reach out to them. Because I think we've all had experiences where we've had surveys pop up on websites as soon as we actually visit that website, and it's just: “Close it down. I haven't even started using what you're asking about here so I'm not able to give you any feedback.”

But, if you identify the specific, perhaps challenging, area - using tracking software to identify where people are maybe struggling a little bit with a product - then that would be a good point to reach out to someone, perhaps if they're still on a screen for 10 seconds or so or perhaps not knowing where to go next.

Would you also reach out to people when you've just actually published a new part of the product, so introduced a new element, or is that not so appropriate a point to reach out to people?

Bear Liu  07:09

That's a good point. I think it depends on what you want to know about the customers. And if you want to know the existing customer’s feedback about a new feature - for example, if you build a new feature or a new function on your existing product, and you really want to know if there's any negative or positive feedback from the current customers - then that’s probably a really good time to reach out, immediately after you launch the feature, and have some understanding about what they think. That can help for improving the onboarding experience for this new feature for this new function. If you want to understand for new customers, what they feel about this, it doesn't matter. Actually, the timing is not that important, compared to existing customers.

Going back to what you mentioned earlier about the survey. I think that's really interesting because you mentioned that, sometimes, when you just check a website there will be a survey pop-up to ask you for some input. We can imagine that the jumping rate, or the drop rate, is really high because people haven’t got any value from your website yet and you’ve asked them to give you something as an input. You’ve asked them to invest time to do that. That's actually not the right way to do that.

From a design perspective, we have something called experience mapping. By doing that you, would map out the customer journey when using a website, for example. What are those touchpoints? If a new customer checks your website and does something - does some general search and maybe finds their information - and then maybe, next step, does some proper research about a specific product and then makes the order, or things like that.

When you map out the whole journey and then, by talking to customers, you can map out the “happy moments” or the “angry moment” as a curve flow. On the top of it: really happy, really exciting. At the bottom: negative, not happy. And as a designer, or as product people, it would be good to utilize those happy moments - those emotional high peaks of their journey - to nudge them into making some decisions. Like, a “Hey, you just completed this task. Congratulations!” pop-out with this little message, “Would you mind just spending 30 seconds completing this survey to document what you’ve found about our product and to help us improve.”

By doing that, you can expect a better result, a better outcome, rather than just throwing things directly to your customers, even when they are not ready. This could be something that seems quite simple, but we take things in detail to see, how does the journey look? What do they feel? Then it can actually improve the performance with some measurable metrics, with measurable ways to see the result - the improved before and after result. This is also something, I think, that’s relevant to this: to understanding your customer. It’s really important.

David Bain  11:04

And talking about simple changes, sometimes a change as simple as altering a phrase within a heading or a subheading, or a little piece of content on a page, can significantly assist with conversion rates or where a customer has to go next. 

How do you actually define the changes in content that are required? And is that what you find as well? Do you find that a very simple content change can sometimes have a significant impact? 

Bear Liu  11:34

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I think it's even a new subject in design and product territory, called “UX copy” or “UX writing”. Sometimes, even just some tweaks on the copy can hugely improve the performance. I can give an example, but probably on the high level.

David Bain  12:05

Yeah, sure. Obviously, we know that you're product designer for Xero, and you've had a great positive impact there, so I guess in terms of that brand? Can you think of a high-level example of how you've implemented something that's had a significant difference?

Bear Liu  12:29

Yeah, definitely. Maybe as a follow-up from your previous question - if there are any small tweaks that can make some difference, and also with some measurable results. To give an example: we had some complaints, or negative reviews, on the App Store for our product. 

Every review will be recorded and sometimes discussed with the team internally, to see why they have this feedback and is there anything we can improve. We'll do that on a regular basis. We even gather automation. For every team member, if there's a review from the App Store, we automatically get an email, and a Slack message, and then we can jump in to discuss if there's something we can do to improve it. Because we do think that any reviews from the App Store or the Google Play Store, actually means that it's already happened many times, but only a really small number of customers will leave a review. That would be like the emphasis on one type of behavior from customers.

As an example, we received some negative feedback that customers didn't understand the error messages while they're using the app. Some messages are quite generic or don’t solve their problem. For example, if you tap to submit a form in the app, and if there's a back-end failure or some issues from the service, then the customers don't see anything. They see a pop-up module to say, “Oops, it seems something’s wrong.” and “Try it later.” or “Oops, something’s wrong.” So, it doesn't solve their problem, and some customers get really angry about that. Like, “Why are you showing this to me? It doesn't tell me anything?” 

So, we check those reviews and then think, “Right. Is there any information we can give to help them? Any specific information that will help them when they see the errors? And then we triage those errors from a tech perspective. For some errors, the customers can do something - they probably can log out and log in, and then they can solve the problem. For some problems, actually, they can't do anything, or it might be their problem - for example, it might be the network isn’t good, the connection is not good from their end, and they cannot receive any data.

By doing that, we differentiate those different scenarios, and use the copy to specify: “These are the things you are dealing with, and what's the next-step action you can do.” For example, for some errors you just let them know, “Just try it later” and, if you still have a problem, there's a link you can tap to go to contacts. And for some, like connection issues, we show them “Maybe it's your internet connection, so please check your internet connection status.”, or you can even see the zero-status page to check the different statuses: is that connected? Or is it blocked? Or is it paused? Or another different status. 

By doing that, we improved the copy. And also, we checked after a few weeks to see if there was any improvement on those reviews. It's dramatically clear. I think it's doubled the positive reviews and reduced the number of negative reviews a lot. This is a high-level example, a case study of how we might do that.

David Bain  17:21

That's brilliant. That's brilliant. So, essentially, what you're saying is to utilize something like a mind map or a flowchart to identify all the potential negative scenarios that someone may encounter, and to have some kind of solution ready to be presented when someone hits that negative scenario, so it's dealt with correctly, and so they feel more positive about your brand - because you're dealing with their issues as soon as they occur.

Bear Liu  17:49

Yeah, exactly. And also, it's quite interesting because, from our research, we find that – even for customers who aren’t able to complete their task - if you give them a specific action or something that is a direction, they will feel much more confidence, or much better. Rather than, if you give them feedback or a reply message without any useful information, normally, they will feel quite frustrated.

Yeah, it's quite interesting to have this because, before that, we had a different mindset or a different understanding about customers. But, after that, the whole team - not only the designers, but the whole team - has a better understanding of, “Oh, at this stage the customer might behave differently.” And, if we can reduce those types of negative experience scenarios, that will be the best. But, if we can't, we can use that to provide some suggestions with directions - but even without a clear solution that will be better than nothing. I hope that makes sense.

David Bain  19:16

Yes, absolutely. A lot more to dive into, potentially, there but hopefully we'll have another discussion at some point about that.

Well, let's move on from what works now to planning for the future. So, in your opinion, what's the biggest marketing trend or challenge for marketers over the coming year?

Bear Liu  19:32

Well, that's a really big and hard question. I think that, as a designer, I don't want to predict what exactly will come over the next year and in the future. But, there are some things happening and, from my observation, if it's started to happen this year or in recent years, it might keep going over the coming years.

I think there are three things. The first thing that is actually happening is the AI co-design, or we can say AI-collaborated marketing. There are a lot of new technology platforms that are relevant, with AI or with Artificial Intelligence support. That currently is helping design as well, which has really freaked out many designers, but that might become a deeper connection in the coming year. And, according to the speed of this domain, I think the current problem may be that it's hard to talk to the machine directly, which might be a good opportunity for marketing, and designers, and other professionals to dive in. So, AI co-marketing, AI co-design, could be one thing.

The second thing I think might be the no-code movement. That can bring us a lot of tools that don’t need so much investment for marketers, or for small business owners, to do that. We’re used to, if you want to build a business, you need to build a website and maybe hire someone for SEO and for other marketing stuff. Sometimes coding is inevitable, and you need to find developers to do that, or customize your website, even. But now, we have many available platforms for people to fulfill their specific need. For an eCommerce website, it's so easy to build a website – build a shop with Shopify and other things. But now, with the no-code movement, there are SEO support websites or other types of services that don’t have any coding requirements. Which means that, for people without a technology background, that could be a really good opportunity to start a business or speed up the business next year.

The third thing that came to my mind is that there might be a new market coming next year. Currently, Meta is investing so much resource into virtual reality, and Apple is also doing something on AR. Currently, our interaction with digital content or digital products is still limited - only with some screens, like mobile devices, tablets, or desktops. But, with the possible new products in AR and VR, there could be a lot of potential opportunities and a lot of things for marketers, for entrepreneurs, and for content creators to do. Because this is a brand-new market. If it's emerging, people will have needs that they cannot imagine right now. But, when they start to use the new products - when they start to use AR and VR - they might have the need, and it will come out, and for marketers, for content creators, for designers, for a lot of people, there could be a lot of opportunities.

It might happen next year, I don't know. It depends on those new technologies - how feasible they are next year. I have a really optimistic feeling about that because it might happen next year or the year after. Let's see, I’m keen to see what will happen.

David Bain  24:30

There are so many exciting opportunities coming down the line. It's quite incredible. I remember 20 years ago when I first started getting involved in designing websites - and using (what was called at the time) “WYSIWYG editor”, so What You See Is What You Get - and you had the half-code view and the half-design view. Realistically, back then the design that you came up with spat out horrible code, with duplications all over the place that you really had to go into and manually edit everything.

But nowadays, it's so much easier to really not be involved in code, and it's coming down the line where you'll be able to use AI to simply tell them something - tell them what you're looking to do - and it will be able to design something for you. I think one caveat that I would add is: marketers traditionally tend to be quite excited by new tactics and new technologies. I think we should probably refer back to the beginning of the conversation and what we're talking about here in this episode: really talking to your customers, understanding your customers, understanding what your customers want, first of all, before getting all excited about what you could potentially do, and then coming up with something that isn't key for your target market.

Bear Liu  25:47

Yeah, that's a really good point, David. That reminded me of a story about technology that I read, yesterday. It's about a company from the last century, during the 60s, or during the 70s called IMSAI. That was the first generation of the personal computer, according to the rise of the personal computer. A lot of marketers, actually, they're not computer freaks. They're just marketers and entrepreneurs and find that this is a really good opportunity, and then they start to build a product and then try to sell it and try to promote it. At first, it was going really well, but then they actually didn't quite understand their customers, because their customers actually are power users - power computer users - and they really want to customize their computer and use the latest technology, but the company didn’t follow up their customers need. And then it's just gone. And nobody remembers that company, everyone just remembers Microsoft and IBM, or other successful or surviving companies.

But there are actually a lot of companies that just vanished during the history, and were even the superstars at the beginning of that market rising, but then nobody remembers them. I think understanding your customers and also valuing your customers - valuing their needs, trying to help them, trying to ally with them - that might be a really good strategy to live a bit longer and to survive during the uncertainties of the new norm of the world. That could be relevant to the topic that we're discussing today.

David Bain  27:57

I've been your host, David Bain. You can find Bear Liu over at beartalking.com. Bear, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Bear Liu  28:05

Thanks for having me, David. It's my honor, and it was really exciting to talk with you.

David Bain  28:11

And thank you for listening. Here at IFP, our goal is simple: to connect you with the most relevant information, to help solve your business problems, all in one place. InsightsForProfessionals.com.