Ingredients to develop a successful product - User Profiling
Users and Time spent
A product is used by the buyer/customer/client and not the creator or developer. In software, Users spend more time with the software than the developers.
A successful product focuses on the user experience and the value of the result provided by the software. Also note that, not all highly usable products are successful too. The value it provides to the user is the crucial factor in determining the success.
The iPod case
Couple of years ago, when iPod was introduced, Creative Muvo and iRiver were ruling the MP3 player arena. But iPod came like a Juggernaut and captured the market share within a year. Why? iPod addressed all features and additionally it provided a 'Value', for its case.. the 'wow' factor. Though the competition offered features, they failed to provide a 'wow' factor. iPod's touch sensitive wheel interaction was way ahead and it made people go ga-ga about that. The competition sticked to click buttons and little cumbersome interaction, which clearly made iPod a great success. Feature wise, iPod still lacks many of the technological / multi format support. But people are ready to accept few issues, just because iPod makes them feel better.
iPod's User Profiling
It is clearly evident that MP3 players are used by people who has a computer. And a computer has a big display and people can see a lot of file names at a glance. So Apple provided a big display which will display upto 8 lines of text. The competition was using a Single-line text display. But people felt better with iPod's bigger display. To make sure everyone can read better, they opted for a lighted background with dark text LCD.
If you like music , then you are a human being who appreciate music. That means, you appreciate quality too. So Apple bundled better quality Headphones with iPod. The competition offered only average quality headphones which was not all-that-good in terms of sound-quality. People realized iPod's sound quality is better than others.
People love more... they like big rooms, big cars, more space.. and eventually they expect their MP3 player to hold more songs. iPod bundled high capacity memory and people were happy by loading their entire collection into it. Whereas, the competition offered 256MB, 512MB, 1Gb etc.. and people felt they are limiting their music experience.
If someone could afford to pay a little extra for iPod, then they may consider purchasing songs online. So they launced iTunes. It became successful because of its purchase model. Buy the songs only you like. And each song is just 90cents. In Indian terms thats a lot of money of course. But iPod focused countries like US and Europe who are ready to buy online. They added an option in iTunes to purchase directly from iTunes. This helped the users to instantly purchase the song or entire album and update their iPod.
and more...
User Profiling is the KEY
Identify your users, understand your users, categorize them - beginner, novice, occasional user, expert users, techie etc. Determine the feature set for each user profile. Study - how will they use the product? how they prefer to interact? what they like to get? what they dont like to get? what are features necessary? how the product should interact? how the product could add value? etc. A good user profiling will let you know what your product should do and how it should do/work!
- Rajesh Sundaram
PS : The iPod user profiling data is entirely my analysis and it is not based on any official data readily available. If you do not agree, please let me know. I will be happy to correct it. :-)
A product is used by the buyer/customer/client and not the creator or developer. In software, Users spend more time with the software than the developers.
A successful product focuses on the user experience and the value of the result provided by the software. Also note that, not all highly usable products are successful too. The value it provides to the user is the crucial factor in determining the success.
The iPod case
Couple of years ago, when iPod was introduced, Creative Muvo and iRiver were ruling the MP3 player arena. But iPod came like a Juggernaut and captured the market share within a year. Why? iPod addressed all features and additionally it provided a 'Value', for its case.. the 'wow' factor. Though the competition offered features, they failed to provide a 'wow' factor. iPod's touch sensitive wheel interaction was way ahead and it made people go ga-ga about that. The competition sticked to click buttons and little cumbersome interaction, which clearly made iPod a great success. Feature wise, iPod still lacks many of the technological / multi format support. But people are ready to accept few issues, just because iPod makes them feel better.
iPod's User Profiling
It is clearly evident that MP3 players are used by people who has a computer. And a computer has a big display and people can see a lot of file names at a glance. So Apple provided a big display which will display upto 8 lines of text. The competition was using a Single-line text display. But people felt better with iPod's bigger display. To make sure everyone can read better, they opted for a lighted background with dark text LCD.
If you like music , then you are a human being who appreciate music. That means, you appreciate quality too. So Apple bundled better quality Headphones with iPod. The competition offered only average quality headphones which was not all-that-good in terms of sound-quality. People realized iPod's sound quality is better than others.
People love more... they like big rooms, big cars, more space.. and eventually they expect their MP3 player to hold more songs. iPod bundled high capacity memory and people were happy by loading their entire collection into it. Whereas, the competition offered 256MB, 512MB, 1Gb etc.. and people felt they are limiting their music experience.
If someone could afford to pay a little extra for iPod, then they may consider purchasing songs online. So they launced iTunes. It became successful because of its purchase model. Buy the songs only you like. And each song is just 90cents. In Indian terms thats a lot of money of course. But iPod focused countries like US and Europe who are ready to buy online. They added an option in iTunes to purchase directly from iTunes. This helped the users to instantly purchase the song or entire album and update their iPod.
and more...
User Profiling is the KEY
Identify your users, understand your users, categorize them - beginner, novice, occasional user, expert users, techie etc. Determine the feature set for each user profile. Study - how will they use the product? how they prefer to interact? what they like to get? what they dont like to get? what are features necessary? how the product should interact? how the product could add value? etc. A good user profiling will let you know what your product should do and how it should do/work!
- Rajesh Sundaram
PS : The iPod user profiling data is entirely my analysis and it is not based on any official data readily available. If you do not agree, please let me know. I will be happy to correct it. :-)
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