Understanding your customer

You can't optimise a page you don't understandResearch comes before testing for a reason.Lesson 1 · 4 minAsk questions that can't be answered with a complimentA good interview surfaces what people do and the problems they have, and the trick is asking questions that leave no room to flatter you.Lesson 2 · 4 minWatching people try to use your siteThe core research method is simple: give a real person a real task and watch them attempt it.Lesson 3 · 4 minWhat an expert review can and can't tell youA heuristic review finds obvious problems fast by checking a journey against known principles.Lesson 4 · 4 minWriting survey questions that give you usable numbersSurveys are good for scale and poor for depth, and they make it easy to flatter yourself.Lesson 5 · 4 minUsing analytics to find where people drop offAnalytics finds the pages and steps where people drop out of a journey.Lesson 6 · 4 minWatching recordings without fooling yourselfRecordings and heatmaps let you watch real behaviour at scale, and cheaply.Lesson 7 · 4 minAnalysing qualitative data without finding what you wantedQualitative analysis has an order to it: tag the data before you know what it means, let the themes come out of the labels, then check them against the evidence.Lesson 8 · 4 minRecruiting people who are like your customersThe people in a study decide what it can tell you.Lesson 9 · 4 minGood test ideas start with a problemTest ideas should come from evidence: an observed problem, a pattern in support tickets, a drop-off in the funnel.Lesson 10 · 4 minTurning a research finding into a hypothesis you can testThe step from insight to hypothesis decides whether research turns into a test or slides back into opinion.Lesson 11 · 4 minDeciding which test to run firstScore your test ideas with a consistent, transparent framework and the ranking survives the meeting.Lesson 12 · 4 minBuilding funnels and segments that show where the problem isA funnel is only useful if it follows the route customers take, and a segment is only useful if it splits people the way their behaviour splits.Lesson 13 · 5 minFinding the job your customer is hiring you to doJobs to be done looks past who your customers are to the progress they're trying to make, and the moment that made them switch.Lesson 14 · 5 minMapping the customer journey from evidenceA customer journey map shows the steps, channels and feelings a customer goes through to get something done, from first thought to long after the purchase.Lesson 15 · 5 minMining support tickets, chat logs and reviews for test ideasSupport tickets, chat logs, sales call notes, reviews and returns reasons are research you already own, written by customers in their own words.Lesson 16 · 5 minNext track: Generating insightTurn what you learn into ideas worth testing.Track 3