What’s Behind a Successful Digital Product? A Proven Ideation and Research Process
We hate to shatter your illusions, but most successful digital products aren’t born from a single stroke of genius by an expert or a brilliant designer.
Instead, they come from a rigorous process that uses future buyer and user feedback, participation, and behavior to shape innovative ideas, designs, and functionality into a digital product concept that delivers real value. This crucial work begins before the work of building a digital product.
Yep, that’s right. There’s a whole heap of important work to be done before you start to build anything.
The benefits of taking this approach are numerous, including greater certainty of success at launch and beyond, faster time to market, and a clear marketing and sales strategy. Evaluating the feasibility and viability of ideas early, helps to reduce risks and development costs.
Let’s look at some of the key elements of the product ideation process we use to get started on the right path.
Test your product idea before taking action
Whenever we’re creating or building on ideas, we naturally believe that our creative ideas are good. It’s natural that they seem to be very good to you. A rigorous, methodical ideation and research process is designed to take that fresh idea and put it to the test before building it.
Consider the executive who has a digital product idea. They get together with a designer who mocks up something until the executive’s happy and then the product design is born. While it’s fine to sketch out a fresh idea, product development from this initial design is risky. Even the most experienced product manager or development team member has ideas and assumptions based on their own perspectives and biases. And that’s ok, but it’s always at least partly wrong; there’s no shame in that.
The risk is that you could be catastrophically wrong. And by the time you realize it, you’ve already likely invested a lot of time, effort, and money on your digital product development. Rapid ideation and research weed out weaker elements and assumptions, and highlight the value worth pursuing rather than staying with the full initial concept. It helps to prioritize feature requests and ideas, rather than doing it all before testing.
This process takes the pressure off and reduces the make-or-break mindset. You can use simple, rigorous ideation methods that ground the creative ideas process in real-world input and customer feedback. And along the way, you gain evidence that reassures your investment is worth the time, effort, and expense.
The components of successful digital product research
By frontloading the product development process with revealing research, we improve our odds of hitting the target with an initial product launch. Without it, development work can be like throwing darts in the dark. Let’s look at some of the ways we work with you to gain the most out of this portion of our partnership.
Always create with input from your future customers
Creative brainstorming sessions and ideation without rigorous measures and user feedback can be an echo chamber that amplifies existing solutions and ideas without being grounded in the real user needs, priorities, and behaviors. Successful product ideation and iteration process always include input from future customers, not just the product team. Done well, user research takes a small amount of additional time and saves you from going down a non-viable path.
Customer feedback and input forces you to ask constantly, “what will solve real customer problems?” and “how will we test and measure this?” at the same time. Problem-solving, understanding customer needs and pain points and constantly testing ideas are crucial to the design and development process. Remember, it’s not always about new customers. The retention of existing customers is hugely important, so talking to them is vital.
Value behaviors over opinions
Only asking potential customers whether they’d buy your digital product isn’t particularly useful when you’re trying to build something they need. Look at what people actually do, and whether your new product is compelling enough to stop them using their current solution – even if it’s a DIY hack – to use your product instead. People’s actions can speak louder than words.
Use a variety of ideation techniques
It can be useful to try different methods to extract insightful information from people. Not just brainstorming but brainwriting and reverse brainstorming, as well as mind mapping, storyboarding and Scamper are often used to encourage creative thinking and generate diverse ideas. After all, fresh ideas drive advancement and innovation.
Get small amounts of consistent user feedback at every stage
By gathering input from your target audience at every stage, you gain valuable insights to determine what you should include in your product, what you should eliminate, and what shape it takes. These tests should be small and fast, not long and extensive. You don’t need exhaustive, quantitative, statistically significant data at this point. In fact, we recommend rarely using surveys at all.
Instead, we’ve found that the best feedback is qualitative feedback — verbal feedback from about five future buyers and users while interacting with some part of your product idea or product concepts. These ideation sessions are a crucial part of our product development process. You’ll actually see their pain points, hear their frustrations and understand their user experience first hand.
This can include asking a handful of potential future customers to:
- Rank prioritized needs, value propositions, or feature/ functionality sets
- Provide train-of-thought narration while interacting with a paper, static, or interactive prototype
- React in real-time while comparing your product concept to one that represents an existing competitor.
This product discovery process can validate your design thinking, and also give you valuable insights to inform your product roadmap. It can streamline your workflows and ensure the most important features make it to the launch product (or MVP).
Three ways research and feedback can guide concept creation
Here are a few of our favorite methods for rapid feedback and co-creation early in the idea generation and creation stage.
1. Create a prioritized list of customer needs
Before the process of generating ideas and creating early concepts, determine what your target audience want and need. We recommend conducting five focus group interviews to gather these valuable insights. This helps focus the direction to go in, particularly if your concept idea is still broad.
- An established management consultancy wanted to develop a new breed of project management software. Interviews with target audience members revealed that task management was an extremely low priority among users. Even though a lot of competitors focused on it, many target customers simply used Excel because it was easy and available. Based on this rapid learning, we opted to minimize task management and instead focus on other user needs. The resulting product was highly differentiated, with unique new product feature sets around prioritization and alignment.
- A financial services company sought to build a new kind of parent and kid money management software. Our early interviews revealed that while the competition regularly defaulted to using things like chore charts to teach kids about money, virtually no parent could sustain them. We dropped ideas related to chore charts and allowances – also the leading ideas among internal stakeholders – and instead created a series of innovative products around neighborhood side jobs, money-management banking, and college planning.
2. Involve your future prospects and customers in the product ideation process
Invite future customers to shape the kind of solution and product they’d like to use. Instead of creating a refined, complete product concept and asking for customer feedback, create rough ideas and options and invite customers into a creative 1:1 conversation. Ask them what they think an ideal solution would do. This customer-centric approach can shape your concept and provide direction in how you market it.
- A healthcare company wanted to create a new diabetes chronic care offering. We loved it when a co-creation participant crystallized the challenge at hand: “I don’t like brown rice, I like brown cake.” The phrase became the inspiration behind a very successful outreach campaign when the product launched.
3. Evaluate viability with targeted guerrilla marketing and mock sales
Don’t treat your launch as a single event. Experiment with marketing messaging and mock sale conversions early and often. Use publicized waitlists, beta offerings, and early test offerings to see if customers, inside and outside of your current network, will convert.
- On the new diabetes chronic care offering, we believed it was possible to use social media channels to attract new customers, even though the client was skeptical. We used a Facebook/Instagram guerilla marketing campaign with conversion into an early pilot program. The waitlist for the pilot program was filled within two weeks — a positive test outcome that informed both the product and the go-to-market strategy.
Valuable products come from constant feedback
Our mission revolves around creating products that truly work for your buyers, not just products that look good. We're not here to mock up the prettiest design. We're here to guide you in shaping ideas, designs, and features through rigorous research unified with real-world insights from likely buyers — methods that ensure the delivery of a digital product with real value.
Other design and development firms may be content to be happy when you’re happy with a designed or developed product. At Highland, we’re happy when your customers are happy. We’ve worked with myriad businesses, from startups to global companies, and we’re here to help you too. Whether it’s updating existing products or creating new products from scratch, we’ll devise innovative solutions to satisfy your customer needs.
If you’d like to learn more about Highland’s process, we’d love to hear from you.
