It’s tempting to think that you understand your users inside and out. But this is a terrible assumption! An assumption that even PaperKite fell for years ago.
Back in 2014 our team was full of sports fanatics so we were all super excited to be building the All Blacks app. We released a feature that would allow users to look back through the history of rugby cup competitions to find stats from years ago. It was a killer feature for any sports nut. So, a user wants to view the history of cups gone by in the app – what icon did we use? A cup trophy icon. Genius right?
Wrong! The app was live and nobody (and I mean nobody) was finding this super-powerful feature. What went wrong? We assumed our users would get it the way we did. But we aren’t our end users. We can get way too close to the products we are building. Since then PaperKite has built out a kick-ass UX research practice. We talk to users well before we’ve even started thinking about writing code. Talking to users – a super simple but core part of the process – has fundamentally changed the way we build products at PaperKite.