Usability Study — Turn MVP to a Successful Product

In my recent casual meeting with a CTO and Co-founder of a Mobility Startup, at a startup Incubator in India, we had an interesting discussion about web analytics for their recently launched beta product, and the co-founder was very happy that 50 % of his visitors spent more than 2 minutes in a specific page. I found the numbers were impressive and I wanted to look at that specific page myself. The hard reality was, that part of the product lacked empathy and I found it very hard to use the functionality and came to the conclusion that users spent more time on that page because they could not understand how to use it, and I wanted to prove it. They did a small experiment by calling a focus group of close to a dozen and after 10 minutes took quick feedback about that page and 90 % of users complained that it took a lot of time to understand how to use the functionality and they are really frustrated to waste so much time to accomplish their task.

Don’t just go by Numbers :)

Building a Minimum Viable Product and having users on-board is undoubtedly a partial success. Understanding the user’s behavior on the product at the MVP stage and building the product in a way not what you like but what users want will surely help you to make your product successful.

I wanted to give some tools and techniques that I use and practice to understand user’s behaviors, usage patterns during the MVP stage with a focus group and take decisions on including the inputs for feature implementation decision in a bigger version of the product.

1. Your focus group should not be more than 4 to 5 at a time. You can repeat actions n number of times with multiple focus groups, but you should ensure you experiment with not more than 4 to 5 at a time.

2. Perform Dairy Studies — You can do this with a specific focus group or use a service like ‘Dscout’.

3. Perform usability testing and capture every minute action and ensure you replay it several times. You can do it with inbound techniques or tools like Glassbox. (there are many available in the market)

4. Close study if Web Analytics, Mobile Analytics

5. <If you have budget> you can do eye tracking (especially if your product is driven by advertisement revenue and each pixel matters) with next-gen tools such as Eyetech and generate Heatmaps.

6. Not to leave the traditional methods of Surveys ,1–1 interview and observing users passively.