Context Matters When Building a Great Product

May 16, 2016 by Ben Yoskovitz 4 Comments

Eliel quote

What are your users doing right before they use your product? What about right after?

These are important questions that can help you build a better product. It’s not enough to understand the pain or problem your product solves; you also have to understand the circumstances in which it helps. What time of day is your product typically used? What triggers a customer’s move to using your product? Where are they? How much time do they have? What else is competing for their attention? What device are they on?

Context matters. It’s a critical part of understanding your customer. And it can hugely influence how you build your product.

The more you can map out your customer’s day-to-day life, including what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and with whom, the better equipped you’ll be to build a product that solves a meaningful problem at the right time. Attention is so valuable, and it’s almost impossible to capture repeatedly. Knowing how you fit into your customer’s day, so that you can interject at the right times, under the right circumstances, will build stronger behavioral loops and better outcomes for you and them.

Jason Billingsley

One of the foundational principles of Hooked by Nir Eyal
Benjamin Yoskovitz

Absolutely. Great book. I think people should expand beyond the immediate triggers to understanding the broader behavior patterns of users / customers as well. I’ve written about understanding those immediate triggers–they’re essential to creating the right behavioural loops.
Iain Acton

Could not agree more.
From a cause analysis perspective – the underlying cause of any customer behaviour has four dimensions

1 ) the core goal/job the user/customer is trying to accomplish
2) the specific contexts or environments where the goal/job needs to be carried out
3) the frequency that the goal/job comes up in the customer life (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) etc.
4) Other related goals / jobs that often come up in the specific context

For example –

1. ‘Tell the time’ is my core job (the one I am most aware of with my existing needs in my daily life, a job that actually exists on an hourly basis).
2. My context is ‘while skiing on holiday’.
3. Frequency is ‘4-5 times a day’ 3 weeks a year.
4. Other related goals/jobs that need to be done while skiing are ‘timing my run’, ‘racing my son’, ‘tracking my speed’ ‘reading/predicting the weather’ etc.

So I get the most functional value out of my basic wrist watch when skiing on holiday, because getting the phone out of my pocket is a real pain (my main solution for ‘telling the time’.)

However, my wrist watch is not optimised to consider the other jobs that could be solved while ‘I am skiing’ (there are lots of other jobs not mentioned above). For instance, a smart watch or Apple Watch with a skiing app designed around the goals/jobs may actually be really useful here.

As you say Ben context matters most.
jonathan hegranes

loved this post. it’s how i evaluate products, and how i strive to build them.

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Context Matters When Building a Great Product

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