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User Research
4 posts about User Research. Every summary links to the original.
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This is not a map - The Intercom Blog
Intercom added a map feature showing customer locations worldwide, kept it live for three years, and recently sunset it despite its popularity because the use case was unclear. Customers primarily used the map to show off at conferences, on Twitter, and to investors, not for geographical analysis. Realizing the map’s true job was as a showpiece, Intercom shifted improvement focus from cartographical accuracy, clustering, and borders to aesthetics and shareability. They redesigned the map to automatically hide sensitive data, look impressive, and provide a unique shareable URL, making it easier to show off. This approach resulted in a geographically inferior map that better served customers’ actual needs, proving that understanding usage trumps the feature category.
Is asking why always the best strategy? - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that asking ‘why’ repeatedly in product design interviews is not always the best strategy because digging too quickly to the deepest reason can miss valuable insights. Instead, the author recommends exploring three productive layers: usefulness (what the tool does), usability (the result of using it), and desirability (the emotional outcome), each revealing different design opportunities. For example, with an electric drill, the usefulness layer suggests power and speed settings, the usability layer suggests lighter weight and prescriptive settings, and the desirability layer suggests a docking station or attractive design. The author cautions that going beyond these three layers, such as asking why a more personal home matters, becomes too abstract and rarely actionable for product design. Taking time to explore each layer thoroughly yields more actionable and interesting insights than rushing to the root cause.
Interview with Bob Moesta on Jobs-to-be-Done (Part 2) – Inside Intercom
Bob Moesta explains how startups can apply Jobs-to-be-Done theory by identifying struggling moments and understanding the switching mechanism, including why people switch, the cost to switch, and how they choose alternatives. He advises focusing on people who have already switched rather than hypothetical buyers, because actual purchases embed a value code that reveals trade-offs and what they are willing to give up. Moesta argues that beta tests must include a payment component to reveal what customers truly value, otherwise feedback is unreliable and leads to over-engineering features no one will pay for. He illustrates with a home building example where reframing from selling homes to helping people move increased sales, and including a moving service or furniture for a divorced mom sold more homes. The interview also covers competing against non-consumption, as seen with Siri enabling texting in situations where typing was avoided, increasing texting by 300 percent.
Harnessing user research with Intercom - The Intercom Blog
TrackDuck, a visual feedback tool for developers, used Intercom to collect user feedback and track behavior, bridging the gap between developer knowledge and user understanding. They simplified a ten-step registration form to just four steps with three entry fields, resulting in a 120% increase in customers who completed registration and started using the system. After discovering through Intercom that some new users never returned after adding their first project, they implemented a seven-step onboarding tour immediately after registration and used auto-messages to track where users dropped off. To satisfy commercial client requests for mobile access without the cost of native apps, they made the control panel adaptive using Media Queries, ngTouch, and matchmedia-ng with a vertical block design. They also added recognizable icons to inline editing fields after users failed to understand that static-looking text was editable, and removed seldom-used features to reduce clutter and focus on valuable functionality.
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