Unresolved challenges in different UX and customer development methods

By Sokolov Semen (sksokolov@edu.she.ru)

UX and customer development methods are used in software development. The main idea of both things is to find something that will satisfy the user. It helps to check hypotheses about problems which potential customers may have or not. It can be used for starting a new startup or adding new features to existing solutions. Also it helps to choose between different solutions of one problem.

Сustomer development[1] (also known as CustDev or CD) is an approach to creation and development of products and services, which focuses on development of customers. The main idea is to find customers with a problem and solution for this problem. Then we need to check if clients want to pay for the solution and check if we can easily solve the client's problem without developing a product. So, there are four steps[2]:

• Customer discovery – Understand customers and their needs that you may be able to satisfy.
• Customer validation – You have a product that will satisfy your customer’s needs.
• Company creation – You determine whether your product will satisfy all the customers needs
• Company building – You can grow your organization in order to support the demand for your product.

UX[3] (User Experience) is a term, which means an experience of a user, who will use your interface. The main factors are:

• Does the user manage to reach the goal?
• How easy, how difficult or how annoying was it?

So, UX methods have a goal to make User Experience in developing interfaces more comfortable for users. We can divide UX research into two subsets: qualitative research and quantitative research. First subset can show you why users do what they do, what they think about it, how they feel about using interfaces, usually from interviews. On the other hand, the second subset gives you information about measurable facts, and you can work with it to find patterns. But both subsets can have the risk of influence from the person who makes this research, or not representative test users, which can be the reason for finding false patterns. We can additionally divide UX research into two approaches:

• Attitudinal – you listen to what users say—e.g., in interviews.
• Behavioral – you see what users do through observational studies.

You can use different UX Research Methods throughout Development For different stages of the project there are different methods: During discovering (finding what users want to solve):

• Interview potential users in their comfortable environment to understand, how they manage with the questions
• Ask users to log theirs daily interactions to analyze them later

During exploring (finding how to satisfy users’ needs):

• Card sorting
• Create customer journey maps to find unobvious problems and decisive moments

During testing (understanding if design good or bad):

• Check that your design is easy to use
• Check that your design is accessible to everyone

During listening (finding potential problems, catch on trends):

• Ask customers directly through surveys
• Use metrics in product to collect data

First of all, not all methods are applicable to any situation. Also, some methods are cheaper, some methods are faster. You need to choose methods carefully.

In my opinion, for Customer Development the biggest problem is people. They make mistakes, which can ruin all their startups. For example, they can try to test their product freely. But there is a risk of receiving too much positive feedback, because any solution can be acceptable for free. Also, sometimes people can ignore some disadvantages of their product because of a little success, which blind them. People start to create problems for products to solve instead of finding existing problems and solving them. In addition, there is a problem called the “shotgun approach”. In early stages, you may want to test too many different hypotheses or markets at once. It is a bad idea, because your time and resources will be spread among too many things. Last, but not the least, you can forget that first of all you are doing an MVP: it should implement one feature that solves one problem. It should be cheap and fast to create, so you should not add too many features at once at the start Otherwise, you will lose all your money and spend a lot of time.

If we speak about UX methods, we can see various of them. But if you want to receive the real image of chances of success for your product, you should use them properly, interpret the results properly and combine them. There can be some contradictions, but when more than one method gives you the same result, it will be a signal of effectiveness of methods. You should understand what you do. For example, if you conduct a survey, you must be certain that participants are the target audience. If your target audience can be divided into parts, you should have equal groups of them among participants. You should not allow your personal opinions to affect the results of surveys. You should not use suggestive questions: the test user should come up with a problem you find by himself. And remember that there is no “silver bullet” which helps you to solve all problems in a short time.

There is not any resolvement and never would be. Only people can think more and make decisions more carefully instead of blind following a guide and blind believing in some clever things. Almost any case is individual, and guides can help you, but not to do all the work instead of you.

There are many different UX and customer development methods. All of them have advantages and disadvantages. Some of them are more universal, others are more concrete. But the only one important thing in these methods is a person, who uses these methods. The person should think a lot, do research and be realistic. He should not allow emotions to be a factor to his decisions: only logical facts.

1. Введение в Customer Development — Маркетинг на vc.ru URL: https://vc.ru/marketing/53090-vvedenie-v-customer-development
2. What is Customer Development? | Agile Alliance URL: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/customer-development
3. Что такое UX/UI дизайн на самом деле? / Хабр URL: https://habr.com/ru/post/321312/
4. What is UX Research? | Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) URL: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ux-research
5. A Comprehensive Guide To UX Research — Smashing Magazine URL: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/comprehensive-guide-ux-research/
6. Customer development pitfalls that will sink your startup URL: https://blog.close.com/lean-sales-customer-development-pitfalls-that-will-sink-your-startup/