User Operation | How to do user insights?

There is no need to explain the importance of insight. Whether it is marketing or product development, user insight is the most core link. But insights are not easy to obtain. The difficulty lies in the fact that most of them cannot be simply discovered through user surveys and inquiries. If user surveys and user interviews can discover user insights, then it stands to reason that the marketing/products of large companies will never fail, but this is not the case.

Thinking and exploring the meaning behind user behavior is the source of insight, rather than listening to the user's "one-sided words". To put it more extremely, what the user tells you is wrong.

The reason why users can mislead us is that no one will tell others their thoughts without reservation. At the same time, users also have limitations in their own roles, but their behavior will not deceive people . Excellent marketers and product personnel need to keenly discover the meaning behind user behavior and understand the user's subtext.

Here are some examples to try to explain user misleading and user subtext from three different aspects:

1. Users don’t know what they want

A well-known example is that before Henry Ford invented the car, he surveyed potential users and people told him that what they needed was a faster horse. This shows that users' instinctive thinking is path-dependent, and they are accustomed to optimizing based on actual conditions. In the real environment, there are carriages, so users hope to have faster carriages.

The picture comes from the Internet

Ordinary users do not have the motivation to think innovatively, and are often slow to react to innovative products. Before the advent of cars, few people knew they needed new energy-powered vehicles (in fact, early cars were not as fast as horse-drawn carriages); before the advent of iPhones, few people realized they needed a touch-screen smartphone... Only after the product appeared did users realize they really needed it. Such examples are actually everywhere.

Now of course we know that users need a faster horse in order to meet the demand for more efficient travel, and cars solve this more essential travel need. We should explore the deeper needs behind user expressions so as not to be easily led astray by users. What users need is not a more powerful function, but to achieve a certain goal more efficiently.

2. User feedback is easily out of context

Directly asking users for their opinions on products can easily deviate from the user's actual usage scenarios, which is also a pitfall that many marketing/operation personnel who do not have much experience often fall into during research.

If you are a mobile phone seller, your survey results will most likely show that users need a more powerful, faster and more cost-effective mobile phone. This is a typical case of user opinion being divorced from their own usage scenarios, and such conclusions are actually not very meaningful.

The picture comes from the Internet

It is difficult for users to judge the pain points of a product before using it. Product managers probably all know such an example: the lawn in the green belt of the community has been trampled into a path over time. At this time, the user's subtext is "this trampled route is more convenient", which shows that the landscape planning did not take the user's convenience into consideration. However, if you want to ask users to inform them of the existence of this "road" in advance, it is almost impossible.

The picture comes from the Internet

Another classic example is that McDonald's wanted to increase milkshake sales in the early days, so it launched different flavors and higher quality milkshakes, but sales did not increase. Later, after research, they found that users often eat milkshakes when they are bored in the car while driving to work in the morning. The subtext of users' insensitivity to different flavors of milkshakes is that "users have no demand for flavor", so McDonald's immediately suspended flavor research and development, and made the milkshakes thicker and added some fruit pulp to make users less bored while drinking them while driving. As expected, sales subsequently soared.

In fact, there are many examples where users’ opinions are divorced from their own usage scenarios. But in general, we need to obtain user insights from user behavior itself, rather than user surveys or user feedback.

3. Users’ true evaluations are hidden in their daily lives

Imagine that during the holidays, the whole family, young and old, gathers together at one table to eat, but you will find that many young people are playing with their mobile phones although they are sitting at the table. At this time, the elders will often be unhappy and tell the young people not to play with their mobile phones while eating. In fact, the fact that they keep playing with their mobile phones while eating means that they don’t want to have this meal with their elders, but are only forced to eat together because it is a festival. The truth is so cruel.

Looking beyond marketing, users’ evaluation of and trust in a brand are hidden in their daily behavior.

Let me give you another example that everyone may be able to relate to. When we search for a brand’s official website on Baidu, we often need to add the word “official website” in our keywords. Why is that? This is actually a terrifying thing to think about. Logically, when we search for a brand name, the first thing that comes out should be the brand's official website. However, more and more commercial promotion information appeared in the search results, making it increasingly difficult for users to find the brand's official website. Therefore, users will continue to add keywords such as "official website" and "official website" in the search box, which actually means that users have lost trust in Baidu's search results.

The same user behavior can be seen on Taobao. In the early days, the platform was flooded with counterfeits, so users would add words like "authentic" after searching for brand names. However, Taobao and Tmall later significantly increased their crackdown on counterfeits and slowly regained users' trust. The habit of users searching for brand names with the word "authentic" appended to them has gradually decreased.

It may seem like just a small difference in user behavior, but it reveals a huge difference in users' trust in brands. In recent years, Baidu has indeed caused a huge public opinion storm due to the trust issues reflected in its search results.

In fact, the associated keywords of brand searches and the popularity and sales of related products on e-commerce platforms can reflect a lot of user reviews and user needs, so I won’t give examples one by one here. In short, only by finding the user's subtext through surface phenomena can we grasp user insights.

Related reading:

1. User operation: new funnel model for conversion analysis!

2. User operation: How to use B-side operation thinking to increase user growth?

3. Product operation: How to use data analysis to drive product user growth?

4. APP user growth: One model solves 90% of growth problems!

5.How to increase users? Take Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu as examples

6. Triggering user growth: Is user operation just about attracting new users?

7. User operation: What else can you do to attract new users without fission users?

8. User operation: how can financial products awaken dormant users?

9. User operation: How to make use of private domain traffic?

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

Source: Spread Gymnastics (chuanboticao)