User Operations | Why do users have pain points?

What are the real pain points of users? Why do users have pain points? How to grasp the real pain points of users?

Let’s look at two cases:

Case 1:

You currently earn 15,000 yuan a month, which you think is not bad. But when you attend a class reunion, you find that many of your old classmates earn more than 20,000 yuan a month. You start to feel uneasy...

Change the scene:

Your current monthly salary is 15,000 yuan, which you think is not bad. However, due to the company's economic downturn, HR talks to you today and tells you that the company wants to adjust your salary. Your monthly salary may become 13,000 yuan. You are very uncomfortable to hear this result...

Case 2:

You usually use a well-known brand of drinking water at home and think it is okay. One day, you saw an advertisement saying that water is a channel to obtain minerals and ** brand mineral water is rich in minerals. You are tempted and ready to change your drinking water.

Change the scene:

Your family usually uses a certain brand of drinking water. One day, the news reported that this brand of drinking water has hygiene problems, so you decide not to use their bottled water anymore.

The two cases above have something in common:

In one scenario, people discover that things can be better (classmates’ monthly salary is 20,000 yuan, and there can be more minerals in drinking water); in the other scenario, people discover that the current situation has gotten worse (salary cuts, and there are hygiene problems with drinking water), and both scenarios cause people pain.

01 The root of pain

Human satisfaction generally consists of two states: one is the ideal state and the other is the actual state. When these two states are in relative balance, people will be relatively satisfied.

For example: your monthly salary is 15,000 yuan, and you feel it is about right, then this is a relative balance.

Because people's desires are boundless, we often define this state of satisfaction as relative balance, not absolute balance.

For example: If you buy a book via JD Express and it is delivered quickly the next day, you would actually prefer it to be delivered on the same day. But delivery the next day is also acceptable. At this time, your requirement for express delivery speed is a relative balance.

When people cannot achieve this balance, they will feel pain and constantly look for solutions to eventually achieve balance.

For example: When your monthly salary is 15,000 yuan, you see that many of your classmates already have a monthly salary of 20,000 yuan. You feel pain and think about changing jobs until you find a job with a monthly salary of 20,000 yuan ( adjusting your reality ). Or you are preparing to change jobs, but have not found a suitable job after three months. At this time, your mind changes again. Those classmates who earn 20,000 yuan a month are too busy. My work rhythm is also good. 15,000 yuan is not bad ( adjusted ideal state ). In short, people will constantly adjust their ideal and actual states, and eventually reach a certain degree of relative balance.

When a person's ideal state and actual state are separated, a problem space is created. Pain points are the various problem points distributed in the problem space.

The separation between ideal and actual conditions has two roots: one is that the ideal condition has improved, and the other is that the actual condition has deteriorated. Both of these changes will create problem spaces where pain points are scattered.

For example, the walls of our house are painted white. One day, I saw an advertisement for Nippon Paint’s new product, and I thought that a combination of multiple colors would be a good idea (the ideal state has been improved). Another situation is that my son’s walls are covered with graffiti and I can’t stand it anymore (the reality is lowered).

Many marketing actions use pain points to communicate.

The first one is to elevate people’s ideal state.

There are no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference, this is a typical example of raising the ideal state.

In the process of buying and selling used cars, middlemen have been making profits from the price difference for a long time. Although consumers don't want to pay, they have gotten used to it. It was not until the second-hand car platform introduced the policy of not making a profit from the price difference that consumers’ ideal state was immediately improved, as they did not have to pay this fee. If you pay the difference, it will inevitably lead to problem space and cause pain.

The second is to make you recognize your current situation.

What impressed me most was an advertisement of Biostime in the past - "Give your intestines a bath." The vivid picture is unforgettable. The balance between consumers' actual state and ideal state is often not that important. When things are relatively okay, consumers have great inertia. This advertisement has changed our cognition and made us fully aware of the actual state. It turns out that our intestines are so dirty.

There are also some shampoo advertisements. Many consumers don’t think it’s a big deal if they lose a few hairs or have a little dandruff. However, many shampoo advertisements use various scenarios such as dating and business negotiations to describe how terrible the real situation of having dandruff is. This completely affects social interaction and thus increases our judgment that we are dissatisfied with the real situation.

02 Desire is not a pain point

When analyzing user pain points, the fatal mistake we often make is equating desire with pain points. Pain points are caused by the imbalance between the ideal state and the actual state, while desire is a natural state.

For example: You want to open a fast food restaurant downstairs of a high-end office building to solve the problem of lunch for office workers here. When you analyze this matter, people will be hungry, and when they are hungry they need to eat, so you open a fast food restaurant.

Here, people getting hungry at noon is not a user pain point, but a natural state of human beings.

Why it is not a pain point? Because his ideal state and actual state may be very balanced. For example: Although people working here may get hungry, the cafeteria in this building is very good and completely solves the eating problem of the building employees.

The market discovered at this time is a pseudo market, or a market that is not so easy. This kind of pain point analysis is very common in many product planning.

Because of the two-child policy, the infant and toddler market has exploded. Sister Zhang thought it was an opportunity and planned to open a mother and baby products store near her home. This idea was a typical mistake.

Although many mothers need to buy maternal and infant products, this does not necessarily mean that there is market space. We need to see whether the ideal state and actual state of these mothers are balanced. The existence of a large number of online and offline maternal and infant stores has already made mothers very balanced in this regard. Therefore, once you enter such a market in this way, it means very fierce competition. You need to make the customers leave their original balance and you need to snatch the customers away from them.

If we analyze it in depth, what imbalances are there in the way mothers buy maternal and infant products now? Mothers are worried about buying the wrong products and hope to get more professional introductions. The reality is that the staff in several surrounding stores are not very professional, and there is no better solution online. Only at this time have you truly found the pain point, and your way of entering the market has also differentiated your products: focus on professional introductions, and I will help you choose what your baby should use!

Desire is merely the trigger for pain points. You cannot judge that the users you serve have pain points just because they have desire. There are also many analyses based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is the user's pain point hierarchy. This is a completely wrong analysis method. Many of our products with false demands are caused by this. Some of our marketing actions have been slow to open up the market because we do not have a deep understanding of desires and pain points.

Some time ago, we wrote an article about promoting POS machines. They had many customers and their products were also very good, but they just couldn't open up the market.

There may be many reasons for this, one of which is: misjudging the boss’s pain points. Merchant owners all need to settle payments, but the fact that they have this desire does not mean that they have pain points. Maybe the POS machines they have now are also very good. Therefore, direct promotion in this way will have little effect.

We first need to analyze the imbalance between the ideal state and the actual state during the current use of these merchants, and then find the functional points in your product that can solve this imbalance. In this way, when you appear in front of the merchant owner again, you will not be the one who promotes, but you will become the one who helps them solve problems in their eyes.

03 Pain points are points, not areas

The main focus of Boss Direct Hire: Find a job and talk to the boss.

Because Boss Direct Hire found that when people are looking for jobs, the HR needs to receive their resumes, review their resumes, communicate over the phone, and then invite them for an interview. This chain is very long and it takes a long time to find a job. If they can communicate directly, it will greatly improve efficiency.

The pain point that Boss Direct Hire has overcome is the pain point that the job search chain is too long.

But let's take a look at how many contradictions there are between people's ideal state and reality when it comes to finding a job. For example: people expect to get information about recruiting companies more quickly and get more accurate information about positions (such as whether to work overtime or not)... and Boss Direct Hire is one of the main features.

It is troublesome to find a good job. This is the problem space of job hunting. It is a surface, a whole. It is not a pain point. Finding a good workflow takes a long time, and that’s the pain point.

Only by recognizing the pain points can we find the scenarios of the pain points, create good products, and speak out to impress consumers.

"If we move to a bigger house, we will live more comfortably." This is the "face" rhetoric, without any scenarios and pain points.

“No more squeezing into the toilet in the morning, the house is big and I feel comfortable.” This is the “point” rhetoric, finding the core pain point scenarios of users and achieving resonance.

04 Summary

The topic we will discuss in this issue is the root cause of pain points. When there is an imbalance between people’s actual state and ideal state, a problem space will arise, which contains many pain points.

Related reading:

1. APP promotion and operation: How to maximize the effect of your activities?

2. APP promotion planning: 60,000 paying users increased within 7 days of beta testing!

3. APP promotion activities: How to plan a screen-sweeping event?

4. A complete list of APP promotion methods in 2019, take it and don’t thank me!

5. How to carry out APP promotion and marketing? What are the common methods?

6. APP promotion case: How to go from 0 to millions of users?

Author: Li Hao

Source: Dama Academy