Explore Data - Qualitative

Explore Data

Your goal is to identify how users use your product and WHY. 

What I would recommend is to walk through the Critical Path within the Customer Journey that attains value proposition for the market you are targeting (e.g. from the right channels, with the specific needs solve by that value prop) and identify at each stage:

1. Pain Points
2. Delighters
3. Influencers

I am picturing this as the following:



Source: Inspired by widerfunnel

Focus on obtaining all the data that you can around these 3 categories, without worrying around the relevance to the Northstar objective or the metric just yet. You will have time for that at a later stage, now focus on collecting the data. 

What is Qualitative Data?

Qualitative data can be observed and recorded. This type of data is collected through methods of observations, one-to-one interview, conducting focus groups and similar methods. This usually will give you the WHY behind the Quantitative data that you might observe. 

 How do you collect Qualitative Data?

TALK TO THE CUSTOMERS to understand how they use the product and why. 

When to talk to customers?

You want to talk to the customers if you want to understand:

1. The Status Quo - how they use the current product and THE WHY behind all their actions. 
2. New Product Ideas - ask users about new features/product/prototypes
3. Competitors and Substitutes - understand how they use the competitors or other substitutes. Basically how do they solve their problem (that your product is solving) by other means. 

How to collect the data?

1. Customer Surveys:
• In-house survey;
• Email survey;
• Talk to customer support;
• Exit surveys;
• Live chat
2. User Testing to understand the WHY behind data: observe how users use the product (test with target audience) 5-15 ppl.
3. User sessions video replays
4. By yourself based on your past knowledge and intuition (be aware of your own biases!):
• Identify bugs - this is unbiased
• Heuristic Analysis: identify relevancy, clarity (design & content), urgency, anxiety (friction), distraction
• Usability Evaluation: how easy or intuitive the UI is to use: learnability, memorability, efficiency errors, satisfaction.
• Competitive Analysis: track what competitors are doing: strategy, product features, type of customers they serve, problems they go after, A/B tests. I suggest not to copy the competitors' features, unless you understand the WHY behind their features. Hence, talk to users.