Identifying new product opportunities

Product need to evolve continuously in order to compete with other product and be relevant with time.Right product changes can help companies to grow and increase its market share and wrong changes can not only deter growth but also wipe it off the market.
                           Identifying right opportunities is critical in order to improve the product. There are several ways in which new product opportunities can be identified.I would discuss them in blog .

User feedback

There cannot be anything better than user feedback in identifying new opportunities. People who have used the product can give valuable information regarding your product.The feedback may not be something out of box but it will help in identifying user pain points which the product if addresses can help it to become more popular among the users.The way one can get user feedback are

1.Online survey:Certain set of question can be asked to the user through mailer or online feedback form.The question should be such that it helps in identifying the user pain points.Some of good feedback tools are survey monkey,web engage etc..

2.User interviews:These are basically one to one interaction with the user.It help in understanding user requirement in detail.User interview can also help in getting opinion about new product and features to be launched

Competitive analysis

Keeping track of competition is very important to understand how competitors are changing with time.Competitors may launch new product based on their product strategy but still these feature may help in identifying new opportunities.Every product which competitor launches should be evaluated based on your product target segment and check if that adds any value to your target segment.

Analytics

 Data analytics can give you valuable insights on what people are buying on your site or what features they are using.For eg..in an e-commerce platform you find people uses ratings and reviews feature the most to understand more about the product.This means that uses values real time reviews of the product so many feature can be around improving this product.

User navigation on the site/APP can be a valuable information regarding how user moves through your site.This can help in identifying whether user is moving where you want him to go.In case not then product change can be launched to improve the navigation

Technology

The latest trend in technology can help you identify how the features on your APP/site can be improved.Technology trend may not give new product idea but it can help in improving existing features.For eg..you have chat feature on your site in which manual interaction is required to answer to user query.New technology can help in reducing manual interaction and make this process automated.

Innate needs

Innovation comes from identifying innate needs of the user.Innate needs are the one which user  cannot express.These needs can be identified by deeply understanding the user behavior.Innate needs can bring in differentiation in your product and make it better than competition.

In case you have any query,please leave your comments .I will reply back ..

                                           

How to measure user experience

Improving User experience is one of the most important tasks which every product manager focuses on.There has been a lot of talks on how to make user centric design.User centric designs aims at achieving user goals.The question which lies at the end is whether the user experience have improved or not .How to measure it?In this post I would list down various metric through which one can measure the improvement in user experience

1. Improvement in repeat users in direct traffic

When the direct traffic repeat users are increasing it means that people you came last time to your Site/APP have found value in your site and that is why they are visiting again.Any site which has increase in repeat user in direct traffic can be sure that the user is finding more value in your site 

      2. Reduction in Bounce rate

Over a period of time if the bounce rate reduces it means out of total user coming to your site less people are going off without doing some action which means more users find your site more relevant to your need.

To know more about bounce rate please refer
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en

Note: The bounce can change when the navigation of the site changes .In case this is the case then we should not consider this parameter

      3.Improvement in conversion

Conversion means how many user coming to your site and how many are converting as per your goals.When this number improves it means that more user are finding what they need and therefore converting more than before.It should be noted that the conversion here should be directly through site/APP and not through calling.

     4.Increase in pages/session

When pages/session is increasing it means user is viewing more pages on your site than before which means that stickiness of your site has improved and user is now more engaged on your site.This especially applies to sites which are content driven as well as lead driven.

     5.Improvement in time spent

This metric is mainly applicable for the content based site.When the user is spending more time on your site it means the content on the site is valuable to the user and user want to spend more and more time in order to know more.In case of ecommerce site increase in time spent can be positive as well as negative because it may mean that users are either not able to easily find the information they need or they are finding very good options so spending more time.When response are increasing with time spent then it many be considered positive

                                                                     The metric discussed can be seen in isolation improvement in single metric does not guarantee improvement in user experience.

In case of any comments please feel free to post it .I will reply it to the best of my ability.

Product Management tools

Online product management field is technology intensive. There are numerous tools available in the market which can help product manager in effectively managing the products. Based on my experience and usage, I will try to list down various tools which can be used by product managers. The tools can be basically grouped into various categories based on the problem it solves

Understanding user behavior

1.      A/B testing

One of the most effective way of understanding user behavior on the site/APP is to do A/B testing. It is basically about developing multiple version of a feature and showing each version to a different set of user to identify which version is working better. There are goals which can be defined for the A/B testing based on what that features objective is.These goals then can be tested for each of the variation and whichever variation performs better than other can be picked for final development. There are numerous A/B testing tool available in market. The tools which are famous are

·         Optimizely: It has both paid and free version. One can test up to 1 lakh user for free in this tool. One can try out this tool at https://www.optimizely.com/

·         VWO: It also has both paid and free version. One can test comparatively less number of users for free in this tool. The tool can be accessed at https://vwo.com/

·         Google’s experiment: It is part of google analytics which allows to do A/B testing on various features pages

     2.       Heat Maps:

The heat maps is basically a click map where you can know where on the site/mobile user is clicking. Heat maps helps in understanding which elements are more valuable to the user and so the interface can be rearranged as per user behavior. The heat maps also helps in identifying the elements which are not used at all and thus can be removed from the site. Some of the famous tools are

Crazy egg: This has paid version as well as free version. Free version is available for one month. It can be accessed at https://www.crazyegg.com/

Data Collection Analysis

In order to improve the product it is necessary to understand how your site is currently performing. This means that data for site needs to be collected and stored so that it can be analyzed as and when it is required.

There are numerous tools available which helps in analytics. The most famous ones are as below

1.  Google Analytics

This the most widely used analytics tools in online industry. This tool helps you in knowing everything about the site and identifying new product opportunities. It provides below functionality

• Page tracking: This helps in understanding how the various pages of your site is performing in terms of bounce rate, time spent, traffic composition etc…The google analytics code needs to be place on each page in order to access this data.
• Event tracking: This helps in understanding how many times a particular action is performed by the user for ex... How many time a button is clicked, how many times user fills a form etc…
• Channel grouping: This helps in organizing the traffic into various channels such as Organic, Paid, and Direct etc... There is default channel grouping available which can be used for this
• Content grouping: The various pages on your site can be grouped together based on the content of the pages.

      2. Omniture

This is another tools which is similar to google analytics. It is basically used by ecommerce companies to do data analysis.

Wireframe and Prototype

In order to develop any product first its prototype needs to be developed. There are numerous tools available in the market which allows creating wireframes .Below are some of the tools available in the market and I have used them

1.   Just in Mind

 It is one of the most widely used wireframe tools. It has free version as well as paid version. Once can design desktop wireframe as well as mobile wireframe using this tool. This tool can be accessed at www.justinmind.com/

2.  Balsamiq

This tools is very simple to use. It can be used to create basic desktop wireframe. It is not so much suitable for creating mobile wireframe. This tools also has free and paid version. It can be accessed at https://balsamiq.com/

3   3.    Mockflow

This tools is suitable for creating mobile mockups. It can be accessed at https://www.mockflow.com

Conversion drop-what to check?

People working in online industry frequently face challenges related to site conversion. Conversion can be defined differently for different portal based on the industry in which it operates and based on the goal of the portal. For ex... Goal of E-commerce is to sell product so for them conversion would Buyers/Total Visitors. In case of consumer internet which acts as intermediate between buyers and seller it would be Respondents (People who dropped inquiry)/Visitors. Whatever may be the definition every online portal works with certain goal and conversion is very critical for every site.

What affects the conversion?

Conversion of site get affected by various parameters such as

• Traffic composition: It is basically the quality of traffic every site get. Generally, majority of traffic comes from SEO, Direct, and SEM.

• Changes made to site: New features on being added to the site to make it more user friendly which many have positive or negative impact on your conversion

• Consumer behavior changes: It is basically the change in preference of the visitors coming to your site.

• Sentiments of People: External factors such as floods, climate, earth quake may affect the sentiments of people any they may become choosy for ex. Recent floods in Chennai has affected the real estate industry as people have now become very choosy in terms of locality.

How to identify the exact reason 

Identifying the exact reason for the drop and fixing it is very critical since it affect the business of the portal. The conversion can drop because of decrease in push from micro conversion to macro conversion.Here the list of exhaustive steps that can be taken to identify the reason behind it

1. Check the traffic composition:

Compare the traffic composition for the month against the previous month when the conversion was better. Is there a change in the traffic composition? Is the better quality traffic going down? In that case you need identify which one is going down. Is it SEO? Then check whether the traffic for competitors have also gone down. Is that the case then no reason to worry and it can be attributed to seasonal drop.

                                                     Has the traffic gone down only for your site?Yes.Then the reason for that case has to be identified as fixed. In case traffic composition has not changed then move on to step 2.

2. Check the Page conversion:

Every site has some critical pages such as home page, listing page, detail page, response page/Payment Page which most of visitors uses. There may be certain page which may be causing the drop in the conversion. In Google Analytic or other web analytic tools check whether to the conversion of certain pages has dropped compared to previous reason. In case yes, identify the features which have been launched on that page and check if it has impacted conversion. In case yes then fix them.

3. Consumer behavior changes: 

In case page conversion was not affected by new features then check whether user preference has changed over time from the available data. In case it has changed then work on the logic used to show the information to the user based on the changed behavior and it should help in improving the conversion

4. Sentiments changes: 

In this case, the user may not be willing to transact because of poor sentiment such things can be easily identified from external environment in this case not much in your hands .Wait for the sentiment to improve.

5.Changes in text of call to action button

The text which you show on your site also affects the conversion of your site.When call to action button text is changed it affect the CTR for the button and hence also the overall conversion.Ensure that you do the audit of your text.

What defines good user experience?

Good user experience is critical for increasing repeat visitors to your site or APP. A good experience can bring in traffic without much effort and if the experience is not good it takes lot of effort to bring back the user. User experience is a function of various attributes which a product has.  In this blog I would try to jot down these attributes which define the user experience for online products.

                                        Every product has two component tangible product and intangible product. Tangible product is the one which can be seen and used such as Website/APP. Intangible product can only be experienced such as Service. User experience is combination of these two components.

 

 

The various attributes which defines user experience are as below

Tangible Product

 Easy Discovery of information

A user coming to site/APP will be able to do a transaction only when he is able to find the product he is looking for. Every site should have various ways in which the user can discover information he requires. Some of the most common method

• Search: This is the most common method that is used by most of online product to allow user to search. The search here should be comprehensive enough. Elastic or Solar search can help in improving performance of the search.
• Recommendations: These are basically based on user behavior some information is recommended to him

Correctness of data:

Every user wants information which is up to date. In case, he finds information which is wrong, the trust of the user goes down and overall has negative impact on the brand of the product. When the data is not correct, user will move to other site

Richness of data:

The data which is shown to the user should be rich enough to make sense to the user. Ex.. In case of eCommerce, which sell various products, each product should have complete information which help user in deciding the right product for him. In case of incomplete information he may not buy the product.

Easy to use interface: 

No matter how good is the information and feature on the site or app, if user is not able to use and understand it easily it will be of little benefit to the user. The various elements used on the site/APP should be selected such that it requires least effort in order to perform the various actions which user wants to perform. The best practices for UX should be followed.The interface should be made easy and simpler to user in order to improve the conversion. The below are guidelines for good user interface

• Use the right element: The element which is used should be easy to user. There may be various elements used for particular action eg In order to select a product category drop down, open selection or simple text box can be used. In this case identify which is more suitable based on volume of data and device
•  Space them properly: The elements should not be very close to each other. They should be separated properly so that they do not interfere with each other. This is very important for mobile devices.

Organization of information: 

Information makes sense to the user only when they are presented at right place and in right context. When user browses through a site, the information should be presented in the manner in which user wants.

Effective Navigation:

When user comes to any site, he browses through the various pages of the site. When it is easy to navigate, user would go through many pages and be engaged on the site. This means all the links of your site should be easily accessible to the user to navigate to the appropriate pages. There are various through which navigation can be defined

1. Header: All the important links can be embedded in the header so that user can easily navigate

2. Footer: Footer can be used effectively to help user know more about the brand.

  Intangible Product                                                            

 Service delivery:

When user comes to site/APP and does some transaction such as buys a product, he may need offline services which many include delivering product, connecting with seller etc.This service delivery plays an important role in overall experience of the product. In case online experience is good but the service delivery was not up to the mark he may not visit the site next time

Complaint resolution:

When user raises a complaint, it needs to be addressed effectively so that he gets satisfied. In case he is not satisfied, he can shift to other brand which may lead to loss of valuable customer. Costumer acquisition being a costly affair, it is critical that existing customers are satisfied and retained.

Timelines

The service should be delivered on time.When the service offered is not provided on time it leads to dissatifaction