How to Know When Your Product Is Going to Fail

Your Users Don’t Agree on Anything

If you are working with a market segment and users are completely divided about what they want in a product, you might be on the wrong track. You might find that some users love a certain feature set or design direction, while other users hate that same feature set or design direction. In this situation, it becomes very difficult to determine the appropriate feature set or an effective design direction for your product. There’s a very good chance that you’ll alienate half of your intended users, but there’s a much more significant danger of losing all users by trying to please everyone.

If this happens, chances are that you are dealing with two or more unique groups within a market segment. Take the camera market, for example. One market segment comprises professional photographers, but within that segment, you might find significant differences in peoples’ needs and preferences. When investigating further, you might find that landscape photographers have very different needs from portrait photographers. In this case, you should further segment the market. Once you’ve done so, you’ll have a choice to make: either to try to design for both segments or to pick a single segment on which to focus. If you focus on one segment, obviously you are giving up the entire other segment and targeting a smaller market than you had previously intended. You’ll have to go back to your market research to determine whether this smaller segment is worth your investment. However, if you try to target both segments, there’s a danger of creating a product that doesn’t work well for anyone by attempting to incorporate wide-ranging features and design elements that begin to interfere with each other.

Your Users Don’t See Value in Your Product

If you put a product in front of users and they don’t tell you that they want it, you might be on the wrong track. Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until they see it.” This is typically true. People are often so accustomed to their own unmet needs and pain points that they can’t see them anymore. It’s for this reason that self-reporting through surveys and static interviews are unreliable sources of data.

If you really want to know whether users would see value in your product, you have to show it to them. Concept tests are a very effective means of doing this. A concept test involves showing users concept drawings, mockups, and/or prototypes of your product to determine whether they understand the value proposition and agree that the product has value. We recommend your doing concept testing early, incorporating the testing of concept drawings into contextual interviews and ethnography sessions. As a project proceeds, you can progress to testing early mockups, then functional prototypes.

You’ll get an early warning if users don’t understand the concept drawings for your product; or worse yet, if they understand the concept perfectly, but just don’t want such a product. If this occurs, it’s important to determine what you could do to clarify your product’s value proposition by asking participants what would increase or establish its value. Subsequent tests should determine whether any adjustments you’ve made have helped to instill value in your product and clarify its value proposition.

There is also the possibility that users just can’t grasp the utility of your product by seeing a concept drawing, but would by experiencing an actual finished product. While this might be true, the longer you go without users’ seeing value in your product, the greater the risk that you might be investing a great deal of money and resources in a product that is doomed to fail in the marketplace. Managing risk is ultimately a judgment call, but one of the primary purposes of UX research is to mitigate risk and keep companies from losing money. One successful application of research is identifying what projects to cut before making significant investment in them. That said, with the right information at the right stages of product development, most projects can pivot to become something that would be useful to people and, thus, be successful in the marketplace.

The Right Track

None of this means that, if you run across one or more of these phenomena, you are definitely on the wrong track. These are simply indicators that you might be in for some trouble. The more of these difficulties you encounter, the more likely the chances that you are sniffing up the wrong tree and need to make some serious adjustments to your product or even cancel a project entirely. Pivots can result in enormously successful products, because you’ve built them upon knowledge you’ve gained from an impending failure.

On the other hand, if you have a clear understanding of your users and are able to reach large numbers of them easily, and they agree on what they want from a product and can’t wait to get their hands on the finished product, you are almost certainly on the right track. Seek to achieve such a result through a close collaboration between research and design, and doing research will serve you well.