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Business Researching User Needs Solving an Important Problem Assignment: Empathize!

Posted by Fletcher Richman
Fletcher Richman
14,290 Points

That's Okay when you are working on something and ur audience is offline. But when your audience is Online?

Assuming you want to make an app and you need to make a research weather or not your app will be useful and actually used by your eventual customers, what do you do then?! A lot of us here would like to do an online product, a software, an app or something like that, so It's important to figure out how to do our research before spending XXX time on working on a product that people might not need.

How to figure out people need a X software for example? This cannot be understood by an observation of the offline world.

Ideas?

1 Answer

Max Senden
Max Senden
23,177 Points
Max Senden
Max Senden
23,177 Points

You need to create a MVP (Minimal Viable Product). It's covered in one of the business courses on TreeHouse and there are plenty of videos to be found on the subject on youtube. Eric Ries has some really good thoughts and experiences on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEvKo90qBns

To give you a simple answer: you always need to spend time, money and/or effort on creating a prototype and finding users to test it. The trick is to keep the spending to a minimum and try to discover if you can create something that people actually want to use/buy. You'll notice that what you think people wanted doesn't ring true, but you can change your product according to their feedback. Then you restart the entire process and again listen to their feedback. After a couple of cycles you end up with an answer to your question. Either people love it, or you will have proven nobody needs it.