How to profit more with your designs just by talking to your users?

How to profit more with your designs just by talking to your users?

Switching orientation towards your users can have a massive potential for design improvements. Client's feedback left in real time is a very valuable resource. What kind of tools should be applied and which factors to take into account to increase the effectiveness of your design? And how does it relate to its end goals?

Why it is so important

As shown by research of McKinsey international consulting agency, there is a direct correlation between user-orienting and profit. The better the communication with audience at early stages of product development, the higher the profit. Wherein, more than 40% of the companies surveyed still ignore this rule.

The companies that were analyzed included one of the biggest brands on the market, such as Ikea and Pixar. Straightforward and user-oriented marketing strategy of the leading companies is what differentiate them from others.

Another reason is a trend. In the years to come all design will be user-oriented. But to develop such designs one must communicate with end users directly.

Where to start

Your users have needs. Start to meet the needs and stop making a design for yourself. Start with analyzing your audience:

• Figure out the problems of your users, that you may solve;
• Define emotions that a user is willing to experience by using your product;
• Formulate their tastes and values;
• Understand how users perceive information in general.

How to get feedback from users

Directly from various channels: social networks, data from smartphones.

Another way is to conduct an informative user research. An effective interview with a user is a form of art itself. If you get a hang of it, you will be able to get the most valid data first hand.

A well-designed online survey with adequate structure and color coding will help gather more useful information as well.

They have already applied user-oriented strategies

Research shows that the strategy is very clear on low-budget startups. It demonstrates that finding best solutions is better through learning and prototype building.

Startups began to use new powerful sources for insights. Storages that are full of user data have granted access to user needs. One of such sources, among others, has become a developing artificial intelligence. As a result, startups started to integrate new methods, such as machine projecting and advantages analysis.

How it is connected to the end goals

A tad over 50% of the companies surveyed by McKinsey admitted that they don’t have any objective way to evaluate or determine the end goals for their designer teams. As a result, team leads cannot clearly tie their designs to the success of the business itself.

User orientation may become such end goal. And to understand whether it has been reached, one may analyze the user feedback.

Such approach will save years of trial and error for team managers. Besides, user-oriented design becomes a core of most business decisions. In such case a role of a user corresponds to what managers and design teams want.