What do customers want?
Simply asking them is a start, but it’s not always that simple.
For starters, some customers can’t identify what they want until they see it. It grows even more complicated when trying to establish the difference between user needs and wants.
But product professionals find a way.
Take SoFi Product Designer Karly Bryerman, who works on the fintech platform’s lending branch.
When struggling to understand user wants versus needs, Bryerman said she implements stress tests to run her hypotheses directly with SoFi members. For instance, just recently, while working through retention concepts for their lending experience, Bryerman and her team narrowed their focus with a ranking exercise.
“While this feedback gave us direction toward a reward model, parsing through responses highlighted that our users’ need was paying down debts faster for better financial health,” Bryerman said.
Bryerman shared how SoFi’s product team leans on experimentation, data and empathy to determine their next moves.
A user-centered design team
What tools and methods do you use to get customer feedback?
As part of a user-centered design organization, I gather feedback with a mix of qualitative and quantitative tools and methodologies. Unmoderated user interviews are great for narrowing down high-level concepts or for usability testing different flows at any fidelity.
For a more hands-on approach, I’ve leveraged our SoFi Unfiltered focus group for direct feedback from our existing members.
For particularly difficult problems, I rely on fast, small experiments. I try to narrow down my options with rapid prototyping. If possible, I’ll also do live A/B testing directly in our own product to iterate and learn quickly from member data.
To better understand and build empathy, I recommend shadowing colleagues on customer success and operations calls on a monthly cadence.”
How do you put yourself in the mindset of a user, given all the extra knowledge you have about your product?
To better understand and build empathy, I recommend shadowing colleagues on customer success and operations calls on a monthly cadence. Hearing directly from members in a moment where they are experiencing a great deal of frustration is eye-opening. It also narrows focus around their greatest pain points.
But, even when we try our best, we can never truly understand the experiences of our members without having lived it ourselves. While we can acknowledge the challenges each face, it is incredibly important to get real data from our members along the way. We do this by facilitating workshops with our members and prioritizing user feedback at each design milestone.
How do you distinguish between what users want and need when there’s a conflict between the product output and the overall goals of your company?
It’s a delicate balance. Any proposed solution must be desirable to our members, viable for the business and feasible to build — also known as “the three lenses of innovation,” which was first coined by IDEO.
