The Most Important User You're Not Talking To

Do you have a product? With users? 

If you answered “yes” to both of those questions, you have an amazing untapped source for product research. And I’m not talking about your users. 

I mean, sure, you should be listening to users and observing them. A lot. But there’s another group of people who can provide you with incredible insights into your product. 

You should be talking to people who used your product once and then abandoned it. Tweet This!

Specifically, you need to ask these people the following questions:

• What were you expecting when you tried this product?
• How did it not meet your expectations? 

This research will help you understand three things very clearly:

• What your messaging and acquisition strategy is telling people to expect.
• What problem the people you are acquiring are trying to solve.
• Why your product doesn’t solve this problem for the people you are acquiring. 

You’ll notice that I mentioned “acquisition” in each of the above points. This is intentional. You see, one of the things you are very likely to find out from this sort of research is that you are getting entirely the wrong group of people to try out your product. 

If you’ve been spending a lot of time optimizing your ads and your messaging for sign up conversion rather than for actual product usage and retention, it may turn out that you are acquiring a whole lot of the wrong sort of user for your product, which can be a costly mistake. This kind of research is fabulous for understanding if that’s true. 

The other thing that this research helps with is understanding whether or not you’re adequately solving the problem you think you’re solving in a way that users can understand. If new users can’t figure it out what your product does and how to do it in a few seconds, they’ll leave without ever knowing that your product was the solution to their problem. 

Of course, this isn’t the easiest group of people to interview. These folks can be tricky to track down and tough to schedule. But finding a way to interview people who thought they wanted to use your product and then changed their minds is something that will pay off hugely in the long run.

Making More UX Designers

Over the last few years, I’ve had an increasing number of people ask the same two questions. Specifically I get asked:

Where can I find a good UX designer?

How can I get into UX?

The best possible solution is, of course, to teach the people in the second group how to do the job and then introduce them to the people in the first group. The second best solution is to teach the people in the first group to do it for themselves. I’ve been experimenting lately with both of these approaches. 

This need for creating more UX designers is one of the biggest reasons I joined Tradecraft as an instructor at the beginning of the year. My co-teacher, the amazing Kate Rutter, and I each spend 3 days a week working with smart, motivated, tech-savvy students, teaching them UX design fundamentals like user research, task flows, personas, wireframing, and prototyping. Most importantly, we teach them to think like UX designers. 

Because it’s an intensive 12 week program, students have time to learn UX skills and apply them on real projects for real companies. They also learn from frequent guest mentors and speakers. 

It’s a competitive program. We don’t take many students. We’re not interested in churning out a lot of mediocre designers. We want to take a few people each quarter and turn them into great designers whom we’d be happy to recommend for jobs. We prefer people who have experience in some area of design, product management, user research, or engineering. 

So, if you’re someone who desperately wants to become a UX designer, and you want hands-on coaching from a couple of people who’ve been doing this for quite a few years, you should apply to Tradecraft for the next quarter. Or, if you’re a manager at a larger company, and you have a promising UX designer or Product Manager who needs some serious coaching to get to the next level, you should consider sponsoring that employee in the program. Lastly, if you’re looking for a newly minted UX designer, we’ve got a few of those graduating at the end of March. 

And if you want more information about any of it, you should email me at laura@usersknow.com and ask.

By the way, Tradecraft also has programs for people who want to be Growth Hackers and Sales People.