Smart Products need Smart Users or a Better Beta.
The last few years of technology growth is incredible. Tech has gotten so far that a lot of things we couldn’t even imagine 10 years back are a reality today. It’s like magic. Not as simple. Coz most of us don’t know how to do magic. All this new and fancy tech that’s coming up, most of us don’t understand how to make it work.
Last week, Casey Neistat reviewed a product on his vlog — Tiny Carbon Powered Electric Skateboard. The skateboard is a fantastic product — it’s small, no controller, claims to be safer and looks great. However, there’s one problem — Not very easy to figure out. It’s way too technical for consumer usage. Casey is like a tech savvy person. He plays with a lot of tech, uses it to produce amazing content. If he couldn’t figure out the product, a lot of people won’t be able to figure out the product.
Great products end up like this when makers test it with their early users who’re mostly like them. Remember this happened with Pied Piper? May be the Skateboard could have worked better if they had tested it with a wider audience. You build the product this way, you’ll end up with a smaller and a less valuable make it simple for mass consumer adoption. make it simple for mass consumer adoption.
You end up building such products either when you’re building something disruptive — something unimaginable or you’re bringing an existing solution to a different platform. For a new product, the user might not believe it’s possible or sometimes they just might not get why it’s great how it works.
Ricoh built something unimaginable with the Theta, well at least for a large no of people. I meet people who’re shocked when I say I have a camera that can capture spherical images and it doesn’t need to rotate. They’re shocked when I make a 360 picture in one click. And most of these people use iPhones or shoot with DSLRs.
In most cases, the user might not understand the value prop or the product might be too complicated to use. The solutions for both problems come down to optimising the product experience, communication with respect to the end user behaviour. Most importantly in figuring out who the end users are or who they could be.Like these guys at AV club say — It’s all about building a better Beta! If that’s done properly, you won’t end up with totally freaked out users — Again taking the Pied Piper example, Coz it’s very well documented.
I’ve been working with a few product teams here, helping them take the product to a larger user base. These products include SaaS, Chatbots and Mobile apps. The main issues are either the value prop is too complicated or unimaginable or it doesn’t fit in the usual user behaviour.
For example, I’m working on Waylo — a chatbot for hotel deals. Large number of users still can’t believe they can book hotels on chat. The moment a facebook ad for hotels takes them to messenger, they’re confused what to do and why they’re there. They would have been more comfortable with a sign up webpage or an app download page. We’re now working on how we can build this kind of user behaviour, rather get users comfortable with the thought of booking hotels on chat. We’re getting better!
Another early stage product that I’m studying is Snaptrude — a SaaS product for concept level architectural designing. It works like magic — you can convert a hand drawn sketch of a building plan to a 3D model within minutes. But, it’s something unimaginable for a large no of users, also it has a slightly different UI than what they’re used to. We’re working on understanding the different kind of users and how they would want to use the product. We’re a long way from Beta — but we’ll get there very soon.
In all cases, simplicity works the best. For eg, there’s Dextra — which aims to be an artist collaboration and discovery platform. The current users might not understand the end value prop but are curious and very comfortable using the simplest version of the product. It’s amazing how Dextra has got traction across geographies organically. The core to this is the simplicity of the product and the way it’s conveyed to the users. Now that’s something in Beta.
Smart Products need Smart Users — but sometimes as makers, we’ve to take responsibilities of making these users smart, by understanding their behaviour, usage and giving them the right flow to adapt to a new kind of product. To start as simple as possible and let the users learn as the product matures.
