Understanding our customers
Our customers, users, and partners rely on our services to support them in their daily business processes. Failing to do so can cause significant problems in their (climate) control systems. The better we understand our users, the more likely we are to design and build a service that helps them to achieve their goals.
The Customer Insight (CI) circle and UX team gather insights directly from our users and prospects. We document their goals, needs, frustrations, and behavior. These are the foundation on which Priva develops hardware, software, and services for a climate for growth.
Super Mario
Potential customers and users do not want our products or services. They want to create a climate for growth. Just like Mario, our users want to reach a goal, they experience challenges and choose the things that best help them along the way. Only when we understand these things, we can create the products, services that best help our customers to create a climate for growth.
Understanding our users is important because:
- Our users work in complex, highly technical, domains
- There is a wide variety of users that interact with our services in different phases of their work
- We have a wide range of products, varying in complexity and for different domains
- We see a change in the market from more technical to less technical customers
- We are transforming from products and apps to a service company
- We are reinventing the way how we interact with our customers
Double Diamond
Understanding our users starts in the discovery phase, where we learn what the right thing is that we should build. Insight into the user’s goals, needs, frustrations, and behavior helps us to define validated user stories.
These insights answer the following questions:
- Who are the users of a service?
- What are the problems or frustrations that they experience?
- What are they trying to achieve (goals)?
- How are they trying to do it now?
- What do users need from the service to achieve that goal?
- How are they influenced or limited in their job?
- How do they experience existing services from Priva and competitors?
We try and find the answers to these questions with existing data like the Persona & Contexta browser or the research insights in Dovetail. When the existing information is not adequate we use qualitative & quantitative research to figure out the unknown.
Agile
We are reducing risk by learning quickly and cheaply. For that, development teams must be able to quickly update their understanding of users and validate new design ideas.
This means doing small batches of user research in every iteration of each development phase. This is more effective and efficient than only doing one or two large studies at the beginning or end of development.
Hypothesis statements are a great tool to form and validate with user research. Generally, hypotheses statements use his format:
We believe this assumption is true We will know we’re wrong/right when we see the following feedback from the market: qualitative feedback and/or quantitative feedback and/or key performance indicator change