According to Fortune, 90% of all startups fail, and the biggest reason why they fail is a poor understanding of what the customer needs. In other words, they do a poor job of investigating users’ problems and behavior.
As a result, most new products have low adoption because they don’t address a real pain point of a target customer.
For that reason, every startup ought to be considering UX design from day one, analyzing the target market’s trends, common pain points, and crafting a product that resonates with potential users.
Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb, and Netflix are successful not because of their technology. The code that powers these platforms is fairly simple to replicate.
Instead, these companies have won on their user experience. They understand what customers want in terms of convenience, usability, and speed. UX testing, design, and implementation is now the most important aspect of creating a new startup. However, many new startups neglect to implement UX design from day one.
As a startup founder, you’ve come up with an idea that seems feasible, but how do you know if people will want to pay for it?
Understanding the demand for a product is the biggest challenge of entrepreneurship. It’s also where user testing starts. The first thing any good UX designer will do is to talk with potential customers in the target market.
By doing so, the designer gains insight into the challenges customers face. These insights get analyzed and distilled into a customer profile that outlines the wants, needs, and fears that the customer has.
Creating a customer profile like this has become a standard practice in business schools and startup founder training sessions, but most of the time it’s glossed over.
Often, startups create customer profiles without ever actually talking to anyone. It’s hardly conceivable that one could develop breakthrough products without feeling the frustration and pain points of their target groups. How is that possible?
Airbnb founders turned their own flat into an Airbnb. They’ve interacted with many initial hosts personally. They’ve iterated on their products through this cycle of launch-feedback-learn till they felt confident scaling it to a larger consumer base.
Startups move fast. You have to create, test, and (often) fail before you figure things out. Founders are busy and teams are fighting in different battles.
Often startups find it difficult to block all the noise and actually do some creative deep work. Structured workshops are a fantastic way to bring all the decision-makers and designers in one (digital) room and focus on the greatest challenges in the way of scaling the business.
At Bonanza Design, we have our own exclusive Design Thinking workshop templates for different phases of the product development process such as
Throughout a Design Thinking workshop, we use several techniques to help busy founders to focus and verbalize their ideas.
Design Thinking Workshops help in discovery — when you need to identify something you can’t verbalize. It’s a step-by-step process that helps you identify your problem and come up with numerous creative solutions, so it’s perfect for quickly and iteratively identifying how to solve problems.
For more, please read all the related articles that we have about UX design and design thinking
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