User experience and entrepreneurship

Importance of user experience and research in entrepreneurship, my mentoring observations and recommendations

In 3 weeks, I had a total of 9 hours of mentoring meetings with 13 different venture. Except for 2 ventures, I interviewed university students. We talked about user experience in general. I gave information and advice to entrepreneurs about user research, its requirements, subtleties and what can be done experientially in their venture. Being able to revive the entrepreneurial spirit in me in a way that directly affects people’s lives and taking part in the entrepreneurship ecosystem makes me very happy.

In this article, I wanted to share my observations in this process and a few suggestions of mine that I think can provide added value to entrepreneurs. If you are reading this article as a new entrepreneur, I would like to state in advance that as a researcher, I will not guide you, I will show how to.

My observations from Interviews

Entrepreneurs’ knowledge about user experience is mostly in “I’ve heard but I don’t know exactly” level.
In the programs and trainings related to entrepreneurship, information about user experience is not provided and this UX is even ignored.
Business model or idea-oriented developments are made instead of user / customer-oriented works.
Starting off without knowing the user, that is, not getting support from exploratory and conceptual user research at the beginning, ends up with problems about the business model or target users.

Why so?

Entrepreneurs avoid encountering negativity (!) at the beginning of the whole process.
Experiential criticism undermines the motivation of people who have just come up with an idea or product.
There are thoughts such as “I already know the problem”, “I can solve the problem with my solution” without meeting with the users.
In the beginning, entrepreneurs may hesitate to express their ideas and the comments they will hear about it.
Deficiencies and mistakes are not seen because of falling in love with ideas. — love is love :)

What can you do?

Research

If your product is still in the idea or prototype stage, I recommend that you should learn Exploratory (Strategize) and Conceptual (Execute) research methods in a way that you can use it as a catalyst at least in the first stage, even if not as much as a researcher.
If you have a budget, it will be very useful to carry out this process with a user researcher. Since there is usually no budget at the beginning, you can take steps that can take your venture a few levels higher by making a quick search on the internet, what is user interview, daily work and user testing, how to do / how not to do it.

I do not claim that research is an ultra-magic wand, but I can say that it is quite a magical wand. :)

Lizzie Bennet

Thanks to the research, you can take more solid steps in both development and design investments, both material and moral, before your startup idea goes live. For this, apart from the expert opinions of your team and mentors, if any, who set out with you, you can learn about the motivations, emotions, thoughts of the target audience who will be the user of your product, and your impact on them by interviewing them 1:1. When you advance your production processes towards the outputs you get from here, you will be a few steps closer to the desired goal.

Competitors and feedback

Interview users in your target audience and even users of your competitor to develop your idea, and research your competitors very well. Thus, you can determine the opportunity points from the eyes of your potential user, not yourself, and take more solid steps.
Never get angry, upset, or capricious at the negative feedback you receive. On the contrary, be happy and seek solutions and turn these negativities into advantages. If you do not face these negativities at the beginning, you will have to face them more harshly in the future.

Brand language

Determining the language and tone of your idea and / or product from the very beginning will be very useful for positioning your brand. For this, you should know your target audience closely and have information about their life and mindset. Doing research and creating a language that will appeal to the emotions and expectations of your users / customers will make your venture more effective and make it efficient for users as well.
Sure, brand language doesn’t just consist of words. You should be able to directly appeal to your users with the use of colors and visual choices in your designs.