Your client pays your invoices. You passed all the background checks. But how do you know they trust you? We look for signs of trust from our partners, and we reinforce patterns that increase that trust. Here are some cues to watch for:
You’re reviewing the product roadmap in a meeting and you hear, “We need a dashboard.”
You’ve already done some market research and run some customer surveys. Your product or feature idea meets a real need. Your data supports your decision to build the thing. We’re glad you got this far. When you work with us, we help you tune into the insights and anecdotes that keep your design and development aligned with the needs of your users.
You talk to your customers and you really listen.
A developer on your team is working on an eight-point story.
Your team is heads-down implementing a new feature, and you hit a bump in the road. The checkbox, ‘Apply to All’, at the bottom of the form is hard to implement. The team already built all the other form elements on the page with little effort. The way they see it, if they just leave the checkbox out, they’ve implemented 90% of the functionality in half the time. What they don’t know is that this checkbox is a “magic checkbox” which would save the customer filling out the form multiple times.
Did you ever hear somebody talk about a tool they loved? Or a tool they hated? Here are some quotes from knowledge workers about when they ran into conflict with the tools they used. Here’s Carlton, a design lead:
Lab Zero uses a unique methodology that has roots in Test-Driven Development (TDD). In Test-Driven Development, you write the automated tests that will be used to test software before you write the code. So, in TDD, your first ‘success’ is to write and run a test that fails. After that, in TDD, you keep writing code until the test passes. Then you repeat until you have a passing test for every requirement. At Lab Zero, we have the same state at the end, but we don’t necessarily write our tests first. Rather, we write the tests as we go, and deliver code with all tests present. At Lab Zero, TDD stands for ‘Test Delivered Development’. This post is a hypothetical argument between a testing Skeptic and a Lab Zero Advocate of Test Delivered Development. We invite you to discuss.
Delivering value to your customer is your primary goal. You want purpose to motivate your product; you want it to be sustainable and intuitive to use. The way to get it there is by talking to the only people who can assess that value. Those people are your customers.
Whether you’re building a swingset in the backyard or coding a blockchain ledger for microtransactions, you’ll soon know the value of tuning into the signals you get from user testing. Sometimes just trying to find the users to talk to teaches you something that you can put into your product. Listening to the voice of your user is such a powerful thing--we think these ten ideas will help you start off on the right foot.