How to Get Useful User Feedback – Michele Hansen – MicroConf Growth 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] so this will be continuations on a theme that we've had today with Johanna talking about how to mirror the words that your users are telling you and Ally talking to us about as well and so what I'm gonna talk to you is about interviewing and how to get people to say things to you that are really useful and are going to help you grow your business so before I was half of the geocode EO team with the other half being over there mattias I was a corporate product manager and I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people about their financial lives very sensitive things everything from twenty

0:50five year olds to how they make decisions about which stocks to buy to 85 year olds who are worried about making sure there's enough money for their spouse to be left over when they die and the thing about this is that it works for any kind of product it can be a consumer product it can be a b2b product it can be a course it can be a physical product it can be a service and you can even get really great information from people if you don't have a lot of time so it was mentioned how at past conferences which I was in taxes is my first time that people

1:22talked about doing interviews and it's so great if you can invest the time and doing you know really long our interviews and get them transcribed and do card sorting and like let's that's great if you have a huge team for this but you can get great information out of people in a half an hour 15 minutes even shorter than that and I'll tell you an example couple weeks ago I was at the grocery store and I was just checking out had like 20 items and I noticed the cashier that she hugged the women in front of me I thought that was kind of odd and maybe I had just been

1:50interviewing someone so I was in the mode for this and I was like oh is that your sister and I just kinda started a friendly conversation with her and without even realizing it I sort of started interviewing her and in the four minutes it took her to checkout my groceries I had learned that she'd worked for the company for 25 years they used to have pensions but then the company got bought out and they have issues with the unions now they have 401ks she's worried that her Social Security won't cover all of it and I was like do I have something written on my forehead that says tell me about your

2:19retirement and I talking about this with a friend of mine who had learn interviewing from and she said no it's just all in how you ask the questions is how you get that pain from people to get the realist from information so you have probably heard this phrase before about finding the pain and this is why people often say that you should interview people who have just bought your product or they have just cancelled it because their emotion is on the surface they remember why they bought it and they're really excited that you're gonna solve their problem or they just cancelled it because they don't have that problem

2:49anymore or you didn't solve it and they're annoyed about it but I have found some of the best feedback I have gotten this really useful it's from people who've been using a product for years and if you can just sit down with them for a short period of time you can get that information from them but first I want to talk about why we even care about people's pain and so this is a framework that I reference all the time from des trainer of intercom and basically it's the pain frequency metric matrix basically the idea is that when you're talking to someone you're getting feedback from someone your surveys you

3:21want to find the problems they have that are frequent and painful because those are things are gonna be aware of all the time that they want solved there are good opportunities in the low pain high frequency category and also in high pain low frequency so for example buying a house is in that low frequency like if you're lucky you do it once maybe twice in your life but it's so incredibly complicated but so you want to find those high pain high frequency users things that your users are doing so the key to getting really useful feedback it doesn't have to do with the questions you ask it doesn't have to do with how

3:59often it doesn't have much analysis it's all in how you act because you need to set up an environment with the person where they feel comfortable telling you their pain if they don't feel comfortable sharing their struggles with you which is let's face it you know we walk up to someone and say hey how are you doing and we expect them to say something positive we don't go hey how are you struggling today so you need to act in a way that allows your customer to feel vulnerable and open with you and then they will tell you those things that are painful for them and as the

4:33example in the grocery store shows it only takes a couple minutes if you ask the right way and so I was talking about this with a friend a couple weeks ago and they were saying that's kind of like improv and when you're on the stage doing improv no matter crazy thing the other person says no matter whatever costume they're wearing you have to say yes and you have to build on what they have said you can't negate them because if you do in a way it's kind of like dancing if you try to change the direction you're just gonna end up in a jumbled mess on the

5:03floor and you're not going to really get anything out of it so instead when you're talking to a user it is not a conversation you are acting and it is improv and you are just there to absorb whatever they are telling you no matter how outlandish or complicated or stupid it may seem so here are a couple of rules for when you're talking to someone whatever they say goes if they say your products name wrong don't correct them if they tell you your product doesn't function correctly don't try to explain to them how like what what you were thinking when you built it like that or

5:37how it should work whatever they say has to go you just have to go with it so that's the other thing don't defend or explain anything again you're setting up the environment where they are the one in control where you are just the sponge that is absorbing whatever they are saying and you cannot negate them in any way you cannot interrupt them you cannot correct them because in order for them to tell you what their pain is and for them to tell you about those really painful frequent things that they're doing that are gonna help you know which landing page copy to write or know which

6:13features to add they need to feel like they can be open with you so there are two specific ways that I suggest that you should talk to users and it doesn't even have to be all that often I probably do interviews with people which are over the phone maybe once or twice a week and it's probably about half an hour each time you can do these with a lot of different types of customers and what you're doing here is you're trying to learn about their process and so what your product is inevitably one step in their process and you want to find out what the other pieces are you can also

6:41observe them also called usability testing and the giant Research Forum Nielsen's that you will get 80% of the feedback you need from only five people and I suggest doing this when you have a discrete problem so for example you have a landing page you spent so much time on it and it's not converting put it in front of five people give them a $10 Amazon gift card for going through this and see what they think and see what if what they think matches what you intended to put there so when you're doing interviews and for those of you friends of the good place this might look a lot like Jeremy bury me so this

7:16is their process and let's say this is the end thing that they are trying to do and it doesn't have to be something lofty like being a better person it could be for example chairing Stefan's over there he has an online butcher shop business and a great customer for him is moms who are making school lunches they just want to get their kid lunch that is what they're trying to accomplish and our product is right there that's awesome and it turns out there are all these other steps along the process and as we talk to them as we are absorbing from them with their processes we learn

7:48oh the step right before our product is super manual and time-consuming that's interesting maybe that's something we could build we could make it easier for them there's this crazy complicated process down here maybe we can help with that somehow the step right after us is super expensive okay if we can do that cheaper they would probably switch to us and use our product more and then this step before the menu one they also hate it and it takes forever and they've got like a team of five people who are doing it manually that is a fantastic product opportunity for us and so we can use all

8:23of this information about their prop their process to write landing pages write new courses build new products talk about our products in different ways when we're talking to someone this is actually something where I was doing usability testing on last week it's a new product we're building and this is the landing page we made for it and before we built the functionality on the page we wanted to see what do people think this should do so the first question you asked and this is the question you ask every single time when you're doing usability and putting this in front of someone is take a look at

8:54this page and tell me what you're looking at what do you think you can do here what do you think this product does and then you just listen to them and you let them go on and something really important when you're doing interviews or you're doing this is actually a trick that Terry Gross of NPR uses which is that when you think someone is done talking wait a second and then wait another second until it's uncomfortable and they will fill the space and they will fill it with something that is really really insightful because you gave them the space to say that the next thing you want to ask let's say looking

9:27at this button what would you expect to happen if you clicked it we've heard so many interesting things we never even realize people would want to do that make so much sense and then after they click it you say is that what you expected would happen again this gives you really good information about what they are hoping in this case a website will do the last question you want to ask is what was your next step be and this can be so critical because it's also telling you about their process so for example last year we launched a HIPAA compliant version of our product and we you know we've been listing for

10:04years we like thought we had all this energy for it and then we launched it and there wasn't quite as much attention as we hoped for and I was like you know let me just do some quick usability testing with landing page there must be something in the list and it turned out the next step which we hadn't anticipated was for them to talk to their legal department and for their legal department to take six months reviewing it which one you're bootstrapping a company and you need everything to be profitable that is a really really long amount of time we knew compliance would be involves but we

10:31didn't know how crazy it would be so that's basically it for me if you want to hear more about this please grab me after I love talking about this but the one thing you take away from this is when you're talking to users you are not having a conversation you are not yourself you were acting and if you act in the right way your users will give you truly useful information that can really help

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