How defending your product can ruin your user experience
As non-profits, we create products to help us achieve our mission and meet an audience need. It might be useful information for individuals living with a condition, an online shop for those looking to buy something, or the opportunity for people who care about the cause to donate, sign up to an event or enter a raffle.
Sometimes we zoom in too close on individual products rather than the overall experience our audience has when they interact with us. To better serve our audience and achieve our organisation’s goals, we need to look beyond individual events or touchpoints, to think about the whole journey our audience takes to get to our product. We need to really dig into each step, what happened before and what do they want or need to do next? Understanding this complete picture is key to a better user experience.
Start with the audience
We know that we need to retrain our sights on user experience, this begins with audience need. Most non-profits are nailing a laser-focus on the organisation’s priorities or objectives. The part that’s often less deeply considered is the need behind the task your supporters want to complete. The best place to be when you design a journey is the sweet spot where organisation objectives and audience needs overlap.
For example, you notice that people are consistently leaving a donation page. Their audience need is to donate to a cause they care about. Based on insights you have about that audience, you form a hypothesis: maybe the suggested donation amount is too high. You test your hypothesis by creating journeys with a lower donation amount. If more people donate, it shows your hypothesis is right. Notice that though you started with the audience need (to support the cause), the optimisation lives in the sweet spot of also fulfilling your organisational objective of increasing audience engagement. The audience gets to support the cause they care about, and the organisation keeps more people engaged.
Write the user story
A good way to make sure you’re starting with the audience when developing a product is to write their story. This can be as simple as filling in this sentence every time you begin work on a product:
As a [charity supporter/audience], I want [goal] so that [benefit/need].
e.g. As a person who has just been diagnosed with arthritis, I want to find out how I can manage it so I can live a good quality of life.
To really reflect the audience need in the story, you’ll need to use knowledge and insights from subject matter experts.
Use the story to guide how you build the journey through your touchpoints. Let’s say that journey starts when someone reaches out to your organisation by phone, meets a representative at an event, or, most often, searches online. This happens *before* they arrive at your product. You can piece together a lot of what they are likely to do using your colleagues’ knowledge, market insights and internal reporting, including data from your digital platforms. Then simply build the journey that matches the assumed journey and needs of your audience.
The audience user story also shows you how to measure your success in meeting audience need. These are the KPIs you will track to plan any tweaks, changes and adjustments to your product. Imagine your goal was to increase the total value of donations, not the total number of donors as in the example above. The optimisation task would look different and to measure success we’d compare overall income instead of number of donors.
Bring the journey to life (People-Process-Technology)
This is where things get really exciting!
You’ve probably seen a canvas like this for business models and campaign planning. It’s also a great checklist for user-focused product development because it helps you think about all the elements that make a product or journey come to life.
You’ll notice one important detail: only two of the nine squares are about technology. The rest are all about people and process, which is where most of the work (and the magic) happens. Because of course it’s no good levelling up your tech if your processes and skills don’t fit the bill.
Iterate, iterate, iterate
““To really optimise and become a digitally mature organisation, treat your initial product as a first attempt and use data to improve what you made.””
Usually, we create products based on our best assumptions of what people need and consider it job done. But in the time between planning and creating your product and it going live, circumstances may change. It’s much better to release something simple, or even just a part of the product, and then build on that as you learn from the results.
Use prioritisation to review your products and decide which can continue as they are, which need optimisation and which you can drop. It’s about quality over quantity.
This process of iteration doesn’t always feel intuitive. It’s natural that after spending so much time and energy on planning a project, we want it to succeed and become fiercely defensive of it. But instead of defending the product, we need to defend the user experience.
For example, I worked with a client to launch an 18-week email journey sending out a piece of content every week. We noticed that engagement dropped after the third and fifth email, then remained steady. Based on some assumptions about the content and the feedback we were getting from users, we changed the time between sending out the first two emails and removed the third entirely. This reduced drop-offs after the third email. We then experimented with changes to the fifth email to reduce the drop-off further. As a result, we created a better experience for the users and increased the number of people that stayed with us, engaging with the journey.
Follow the customer delight arc
When you launch a new product, you have to achieve the minimum viable experience: the most basic working version. Once that’s done, look for incremental improvements to performance. These are vital upgrades to things like speed, efficiency and ease of use.
Beyond that, if you can resource it, look to excite your user. Seek out non-essential upgrades that will delight. It doesn’t need to be complex: it might be a beautiful design to replace a simple visual experience or a more creative approach to a raffle or donation event. Or think of those ‘page not found’ messages with a cute animal or a funny gif which turn a potentially frustrating experience into something fun.
Don’t forget the tech
And while I’ll always argue that your tech stack is only as good as your people stack, it’s true that without the tech the wheels won’t turn. Ask yourselves: where is the tech creating obstacles or bottle necks and how can it be improved?
For example, perhaps your analytics tools aren’t showing you the data you need. Or maybe data gathering is too long and difficult a process for anyone to do it regularly. Levelling up your tech tools is a vital part of achieving consistent optimisation.
User-first optimisation isn’t straightforward. It’s a new way of thinking and a new skill for many non-profits. There are technology, data, culture and skills obstacles to getting this right. Start with small experiments, tweak your technology and process to enable you to do more and - hold your nerve.
This is a description of the approach I use which you may find helpful. And if you want to chat about this or anything audience engagement and optimisation-related, get in touch.
