A Tech Entrepreneur's Guide to User Experience

Delivering Value

Many business discussions start by focusing on…

• Ideas & Brainstorming — these conversations usually tend to concentrate on the technical implementation;
• Unique Value Proposition — what is the key differentiation of your product or service;
• Business Model — what will be your sources and channel of revenue;
• Return on Investment — especially when seeking rounds of funding, how will the company (and its investors) be profitable compared to its expenditures.

Some encourage Lean & Agile methodologies…

• Creating proof of concepts — such as, being able to quickly validate concepts for their feasibility and desirability;
• Striving for incremental progress — while having a larger vision and mission, you can start by creating a “strong foundation” for your product before building upon it;

…as stated, while most business discussion focus on these previously mentioned topics, a lesson I’ve learned (as a secret ingredient), is to understand your Target Audience (a.k.a. your target customer).

Knowing Your Target Audience

When identifying your target audience, you need to look at their point-of-view. From my conversations with entrepreneurs and from my own entrepreneurial endeavors, this isn’t always easy to do.

Here are a few questions to ask to help you:

• What are the pain-points of my target audience? What challenges does my target audience face?
• What are the goals of my target audience? What motivates them?
• What tasks does my target audience regularly perform? Which workflows are they most comfortable with?

Now to compare your answers from the questions above with the concepts for your product or service:

• Is your product or service solving their needs? Is the product providing a remedy to their pain-points?
• Is your product providing a better manner to help your target audience achieve their goals?
• Is the process of using your product easy or complicated? How do the tasks within your product compare to the tasks your target audience are already performing?

User Experience

You may have heard the term “user experience,” and its acronym “UX,” floating around, but do you know the definition? To establish a common ground, when I reference the term, here is a quick definition:

User Experience (ux): a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service.

Source: ISO 9241–210

This definition focuses on the practice of crafting the user experience of a product, service, or system.

However, to over simplify the definition, it is creating things for your target audience that are: Useful, Usable, and Delightful

Golden Loop

Identify the fewest, core features for a customer to successfully use your product, system, or service Once they have finished using the product the first time, the concept of the Golden Loop, means they are motivated to return to use your product more than once. One interpretation of this loop, the person received some combination of usefulness, ease of use, and delight.

This follows the same concept of a Minimum Viable Product, the smallest core fundamental elements needed for a product to successfully be functional and usable.

Frank Garofalo is the Principal Consultant at Garofalo UX, a User Experience (UX) Strategy and Creative Problem-Solving consulting firm based in San Diego, California: www.garofaloux.com

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