5 ways to quickly understand your users

When doing operations work, you often need to start by understanding the users and the products. As for the product, we understand the company's relevant product documents, are familiar with the various functions and operations of the product, and can quickly understand the product in detail.

However, understanding users is often a difficult process. Especially when we are starting from scratch with a new product, how can we understand our users quickly and deeply?

1. Communicate well with users

Communicating well with users is not a simple matter. In terms of communication channels , we can communicate with users online or offline. In terms of communication professionalism, we can conduct in-depth interviews with users, or we can just chat with them. In terms of communication scale, we can chat with users one-on-one or one-to-many. The different communication methods here will obtain different communication information. By communicating with users in multiple ways and at a high frequency, we can understand their real needs and psychology.

This reminds me of a previous work experience, when I was responsible for the maintenance of a user WeChat group . From what I have observed, group chats are usually very active, especially when new features are launched, which often arouse heated discussions among users. However, when chatting in a group, it is very easy to follow the trend. For example, for a newly launched creation function, it is possible that after a user complains about a bug when using this function, others will follow up to discuss it. Once, I specifically found the user who complained about the product the most in the group and had a one-on-one private chat with him, asking him about specific cases of BUGs that occurred when using the creation function. As a result, he said that he actually didn't find any problems during the use process, but when others complained, he joined in the complaints, hoping to attract the attention of official personnel. It is not difficult to see from this example that the information obtained from a one-to-many group chat and a one-to-one chat is not consistent. If you question a product feature simply because others in the group are complaining about it, you will end up losing more than you gain.

As the saying goes, "Listen to both sides and you will be enlightened, listen to only one side and you will be in the dark." In addition to communicating with users of this product, you can also understand the demands of users of competing products. The usual practice is to infiltrate the communication groups of competing product users, observe what the competing product users’ usual interests are, what features of the competing products these users like the most, and what their opinions are on other products. Because when users are in the official group of a product, they often do not reveal their true thoughts due to their identity. But when they are in a group of a competing product, they are often more willing to express their true inner voice. By understanding the users of competing products, you can often improve your understanding of the entire industry, thereby broadening your thinking.

2. Perform data analysis

Understand the basic characteristics of users through data analysis.

Conventional data analysis includes two types:

1. Understand user preferences and attributes through analysis of product data;
2. Through questionnaire surveys, we conduct quantitative analysis of user data to understand user characteristics.

The analysis of product data is mainly based on the characteristics of the product. For example, products with video content may be based mainly on the number of views, while e-commerce products may be based mainly on the number of transactions. Take the UC subscription account that I operate as an example. This is a media information platform. We analyze data on dimensions such as reading, forwarding, and sharing of content across the entire platform to understand users’ basic content preferences. By analyzing user activity and different content within 24 hours a day, we can find out what kind of content should be released at what time period and which users prefer.

The key point of questionnaire survey is that the sample size should be large and the coverage level should be comprehensive. It is necessary to include users of different levels and categories on the platform. By analyzing the questionnaire results, we can understand the basic characteristics of users such as age group, occupation, industry, region, etc.

3. Understand user profiles

Understanding user portraits is very helpful for everyone to quickly understand users. User portrait research is relatively complex, involving basic data collection , analysis and modeling, and is generally completed by professional user research (UE) colleagues. We can find relevant colleagues or leaders to obtain user portrait information of the product, so as to quickly understand the users.

However, from my observation, there are very few companies in the industry that have conducted systematic user research and derived user portraits. In other words, even if there are some product-related user portraits, it is difficult for general operations personnel to access them. Therefore, I recommend that you use some industry data analysis websites, such as "Baidu Index", "Ali Index", etc., to understand the user's demographic attributes. For example, by entering "UC" in the Baidu Index, we can roughly obtain the population attributes of netizens who search with "UC" as the keyword, including gender ratio, age distribution, interest distribution, etc.

4. Interpret industry reports

Interpreting industry reports is also a clever way to understand user characteristics. Usually we go to some websites that publish industry reports, including "iResearch-Big Data Analysis", "Penguin Intelligence", etc., to get the information we need . These industry reports not only cover a wide range of industries, including the gaming industry, video industry, new media industry, etc., but also include analysis of the characteristics of users of different age groups, such as "Penguin Intelligence: An Introduction to the Social Behavior Report of the Post-95 Generation".

Our interpretation of these industry reports can help us establish a global perspective and quickly understand the general characteristics of users in the entire industry. For example, the following screenshots are some research summaries on the new media industry released by Penguin Intelligence.

5. Impersonate users

The best way to understand users is to imitate yourself as a user, put yourself in the scenario of an ordinary user, experience the various functions of the product, and thus imitate the user's reactions and feelings to understand their real needs. With the popularization of the Internet, various products have emerged in an endless stream. For example, the founder of a certain Internet fast-moving sanitary napkin brand was a boy. In order to better design the product, he personally experienced and studied various types of sanitary napkins on the market to understand the market situation.

Take me as an example. Before operating the UC Subscription Account product, I didn’t know much about the content creation industry. In order to gain a deeper understanding of users' psychology and demands, I registered accounts on multiple media information platforms, including UC subscription accounts, Toutiao accounts, WeChat public accounts and other products. I also learned to post articles every day like self-media people, study the data of my own account, and obtain various functional permissions granted by the platform through continuous operation. With such a process, I can better understand the demands of self-media people. At the very least, when users provide feedback on relevant needs, I can skillfully judge the authenticity and urgency of the needs.

In general, it takes a lot of effort to quickly and deeply understand the characteristics and commonalities of users and their real needs and psychology. However, all of this is not castles in the air. Through the above five methods of improvement, I believe everyone can have a deeper understanding of the users of the products they operate. However, all operating methods and experiences can only be used as references, and more thinking is needed in conjunction with the product itself. Everyone can combine their own actual situation. Choose one or more methods to try and improve in order to better understand your users and become familiar with your product.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

The author of this article @大雄 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!