The mobile-first principle won’t always be relevant · Getting honest feedback from your customers · Focusing only on successful case studies could be misleading
Monthly Issue #3 – June 2024
Hi there!
Consistency is hard, isn’t it?
I set myself the goal of writing three topics and sending a newsletter on the 1st of every month, but I procrastinated while thinking about all the materials in the background. Then time flew away.
Anyway, here are the three topics I want to discuss in this newsletter:
The mobile-first principle won’t always be relevant; otherwise, think of it this way.
Getting honest feedback from your customers: how to ask the right questions to uncover meaningful insights.
The missing parts: focusing only on successful case studies could be misleading.
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The mobile-first principle won’t always be relevant.
Otherwise, think of it this way.
Last week, I was debating with my team about why I started designing our new landing page for mobile first.
Shouldn't we design a website to look good on different screen sizes?
Yeah, of course, that would be ideal. But what if you have time constraints? By 'time' here, I also mean budget. The cost doesn’t come only from design; it will snowball into development. These days, although making a responsive website is getting easier, decision-making is not.
If you are working in a fast-paced startup environment, you will always be thinking about how to move as lean and efficiently as possible. That’s what I deal with every single day with my team. I always try to remind ourselves to think with the 80/20 principle in whatever we do, always prioritizing actions or decisions that yield the greatest results.
This doesn’t mean I will neglect the desktop view. I’ll still design the desktop view but with minimal adjustments. You may also consider going full mobile even on a bigger screen, like this crowdfunding website.
Is this about adopting a mobile-first principle? No. Mobile-first isn’t always a good tactic. It won’t be effective for SaaS or dev tool products where the core product is for desktops.
What about websites that can be used on both mobile and desktop?
Yes, there are products like this where people have different preferences. In this case, you should focus on nailing both layouts.
Some consumer products are not used by many people on desktops. Mostly, the website is used for activation through campaigns and paid ads.
You might find a unique case with a consumer app like Bumble (the dating app), where people visit their desktop version 77.50% of the time compared to 22.50% on the mobile version. My feeling is that the website is used primarily for executives-related activities, with most access coming from desktops.
If you have device distribution stats, it will be easier for you to decide which one to focus on. If you don’t, use these simple questions to help you decide:
Where are your website visitors coming from? (Your upper funnel)
On what device can your product be used?
Bottom line: always identify the high-impact activities or areas and prioritize your energy and time there.
Getting honest feedback from your customers.
How to ask the right questions to uncover meaningful insights.
It’s 2006. I was in my final year of high school. We were busy preparing for our final exams and figuring out what our next journey would be. Some of us had already decided what we wanted to do, while others were still worried, and didn’t know what they wanted to do. I was in that pack.
My first go-to for asking which major I should take was my mom. I had this long-standing dream of being an architect, but I didn’t really know what my real motivation was. I thought building something would be really cool. I asked her if being an architect would be good for me. She supported me 100%, signed me up for a basic prep course for the university exam, and guess what? I passed the exam. But it didn’t feel quite right to me.
I found out some of my good friends took Computer Science. They said this major would teach you how to make games at some point. Interesting. Again, when I asked my mom, she said, “Let’s try it,” and thought it would be good for me too.
Long story short, I passed the test. But I still couldn’t decide. I was quite frustrated as I approached the end, trying to decide which one to pick. I asked my mom why she just supported me without giving any objections or direction. She said she just wanted to support me in whatever I chose because all the options were good if I did them wholeheartedly.
That’s what every mom does. They support you or they don’t want to hurt your feelings.
Rob Fitzpatrick, a tech entrepreneur for over a decade, became obsessed with getting better information from customers. He wrote a book called The Mom Test. He theorized that asking people about their opinions of your product is like asking your mom. They won’t give you honest answers. They don’t want to hurt you or feel uncomfortable saying something negative.
Our team on the Grief Support product experienced this mom effect. We have our weekly community meetups. Occasionally, we have in-meeting surveys asking various questions. One day, we asked about a particular feature if they’d like it. No one said they might not find that feature valuable. All the answers skewed toward that feature would be helpful or very helpful.
To get unbiased answers, you need to craft your questions so that even your mother can't lie.
Here are three principles to help you prepare questions that get honest and valuable feedback on your idea, avoiding biases and false positives.
1. Focus on actions, not opinions
Ask about what they do, not what they think of your idea. Find out the problems they have and what they truly need.
Typical questions you can ask:
How do you do this task?
What tools do you currently use?
How often do you use these tools?
2. Look backward, not forward
Focus on past experiences, not future possibilities. It’s better to ask someone about things they have already done rather than what they might do in the future. People can remember the past more clearly than they can guess what they will do later.
Typical questions you can ask:
When was the last time you faced this problem?
What did you do the last time you needed to {perform a specific task}?
Describe a recent situation where you needed help with {specific issue}.
3. Listen more, speak less
Encourage them to share more while you listen closely. Showing real interest in what they say builds trust and a good connection, leading to better and deeper conversations.
Case Study
Here’s an example of putting the Mom Test into practice:
I work on a grief support product where we help people navigate their lives after losing loved ones. We offer various types of support: structured courses, tools available whenever needed, online chats with therapists, and weekly live community sessions. We hypothesized that adding a daily wisdom message in audio format would provide value, as people love listening to the soothing voice of our grief therapist, Julia Samuel.
Here’s my plan for the interview. I’d organize it into several sections. I’ll start by thinking about the different themes of the discussion. These themes should focus on what people do and their past experiences. For example, I’d try to understand how their mornings are, as this product aims to provide value mainly in the morning.
Once I have decided on several themes to discuss with the interviewee, I’ll prepare a set of interview questions.
For example, for the morning routine
Can you tell me about your current morning routine?
How do you usually feel when you first wake up in the morning?
What are the first things you do after waking up?
Do you find mornings particularly difficult emotionally? If so, when was the last time you had a tough morning? What happened, and how did you handle it?
Then I’d continue with other related questions.
The idea of the Mom Test is to focus entirely on understanding people's problems, rather than indulging your curiosity about building features. Your research won't be quickly disposable because it is more fundamental. Hopefully, it could lead you to build something you never thought of before.
The missing parts
Focusing only on successful case studies could be misleading.
We believe the best practices from successful products, which have spent millions of dollars, can be replicated to achieve similar results. The fact is that most of the time, we can copy the approach exactly, but we won’t necessarily paste the same outcome.
The problem isn’t with the stories but with making instant conclusions by looking only at the successful cases.
You might miss the whole picture, including the factors you don't see, like when an idea didn’t work out.
Ironically, nine out of ten products fail, and sometimes their failure stories are not on our radar—or maybe there aren’t as many failure case studies available as successful ones.
Focusing only on the successful ones, or the ‘survivors’, could be misleading—a theory Abraham Wald, a great statistician during World War II, called survivorship bias.
During the war, the Allies wanted to make their military aircraft more likely to survive missions and reduce losses. They started by studying the planes that came back from combat. They noticed that certain areas, like the wings, were more frequently hit by enemy fire. The first idea was to reinforce these heavily damaged areas. The thinking was simple: if these parts were getting hit the most, strengthening them would better protect the planes.
Wald realized that drawing a conclusion based on the planes that came back was a mistake. These planes survived even with damage, which meant the hit areas were not critical for their return. In the end, they added extra protection to cover the undamaged parts.
The missing planes were the missing data, which also holds an important part of a complete analysis.
Learning from mistakes and failures can help us form better conclusions by looking at the complete situation.
Mindsets to adopt:
Use best practices as a starting point, not the end goal.
Consider looking at the entire dataset, including failure cases.
Actively seek and analyze negative feedback and criticism.