#149 - Research Tactics for Designers & PMs with Tyler Wanlass of CommandBar
Jun 4, 2024
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Tyler Wanlass, lead product designer at CommandBar, shares practical strategies for user research for designers and PMs. He discusses scrappy approaches, creative participant recruitment, and mixed-methods continuous discovery. Tools like session recordings and account impersonation offer deeper insights. Proactive research, social listening, and competitive analysis are key. Helpful for those without a dedicated research team looking to build thoughtful products efficiently.
Building intuition through customer interactions fosters quicker decision-making and aligns solutions with customer expectations.
Utilizing guerrilla research and customer interactions enhances product development for designers and PMs.
Observing user behaviors via session recordings and impersonation features provides valuable insights for improved product strategies.
Deep dives
Building Intuition through Customer Insights
Building intuition is emphasized as essential to making informed decisions when entering new contexts. By interacting with customers, gaining insights, and studying their behaviors, individuals can develop a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This intuitive approach allows for quicker decision-making and the ability to create solutions that align closely with customer expectations, ultimately leading to more successful outcomes.
Practical Approaches to Research for Designers and PMs
The episode discusses practical tactics for designers and product managers to conduct research effectively, even if research is not their primary role. Emphasizing the importance of gathering insights, the podcast explores methods like leveraging guerrilla research and utilizing customer interactions to enhance product development. By integrating customer feedback and observations into their workflow, designers and PMs can make better-informed decisions and drive successful product outcomes.
Utilizing Impersonation and Session Recordings for Customer Insights
The discussion highlights the use of impersonation features to understand how customers navigate and interact with products. By observing customers' behaviors through session recordings and applying filters like depth, breadth, and monetization, valuable insights can be gained at scale. This method allows teams to identify patterns, preferences, and pain points in user interactions, leading to enhanced product development strategies and improved user experiences.
Using Analytics Tools and Session Recordings to Understand User Behavior
The podcast discusses the importance of using analytics tools and session recordings to gain insights into user behavior. By analyzing sessions at scale and focusing on specific user actions, such as repeated visits to a particular feature or tracking user journeys through a product, it becomes possible to identify power users, optimize feature usage, and improve overall retention rates. Additionally, segmenting user behavior based on usage frequency can help in understanding the value users derive from specific features and guide efforts to enhance user engagement.
Balancing Scrappiness and Thoroughness in Research and Decision-Making
The podcast highlights the significance of striking a balance between being scrappy and meticulous in research and decision-making processes. While emphasizing the need for rapid iteration and learning from customer interactions, it also stresses the importance of thoughtful testing, particularly in areas like pricing and packaging that have a substantial impact on customer behavior and business outcomes. Adopting a data-informed approach and leveraging customer insights can lead to more effective product development and decision-making processes.
In this episode, Erin and Carol sit down with Tyler Wanlass, lead product designer at CommandBar, to explore practical strategies for conducting user research without a dedicated research team. They dig into techniques that designers and product managers can use to gather valuable insights efficiently, especially in resource-constrained environments. Tyler's approach is scrappy, flexible, and creative.
Tyler shares some of the tools that create his research toolkit, including efficient note-taking, creative approaches to participant recruitment, and mixed-methods continuous discovery methods. He explains how session recordings and account impersonation can offer deeper insights when primary research isn't possible. Tyler reinforces the value of proactive research, such as social listening and competitive analysis.
This is a useful conversation for anyone without "researcher" in their title, but who wants to increase their customer engagement, build more thoughtful products, and do so in a way that respects both budgets and timelines.
Episode Highlights
03:16 - The scrappy mindset: learning from real-life experiences
10:21 - Broadening perspective through cross-industry inspiration
16:12 - Proactive user research for connecting and learning
24:17 - Streamlining customer feedback with TL;DR summaries
36:51 - Tools and tactics for customer insights
44:09 - The importance of pricing and packaging
About Our Guest Tyler design interfaces for software products, builds internet businesses, and occasionally writes books. In his off time he's renovating a 100 year old Victorian house in the Pacific Northwest. In a past life he designed video games.
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