UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want

by Jaime Levy

Step 1: Define your primary customer segment. Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s (biggest) problem. Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions. Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition. Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned!

Therefore, if you think your customer is everybody, think harder. Otherwise,

The customer is a group or segment of people with a common need or pain.

Instead, approach every new product or project like an experiment.

Razorfish or Sapient used personas to upsell the research/discovery phase to clients. When used in this way, personas were often laughable caricatures packed full of stereotypical details based on nothing more than marketing data.

“Don’t confuse persona archetypes with stereotypes. Because personas provide a precise design target and also serve as a communication tool to the development team, the designers must choose a particular demographic characteristics with care.”

The provisional personas will collect and present the assumptions you are making about your primary customer segment.

They’ve assumed that customers want their product. But as I’ve already stated, the UX strategist wants to know whether those assumptions are correct.

Direct competitors are companies that offer the same, or very similar, value proposition to your current or future customers. This means that the customers you want are alive right now and spending their time and money on the Internet using a direct competitor’s product instead of yours to solve their problem — whether it is the best interface or not!

Indirect competitors offer a similar value proposition to a different customer segment; or, they target your exact customer base without offering the exact same value proposition. For instance, an indirect competitor’s primary service might not be your value proposition, but their secondary service definitely is. Or, your customer base is using an aspect of an indirect competitor’s interface to solve the problem that our soon-to-be-amazing product will!

Make sure that you consider all of your competitors because they will affect the overall success of your product.