First of all Wish you a very very Happy New year. This year CES has welcomed 2016 with a lot of exciting innovative products in the IOT world. My favorite was mood detector! I am going to buy that soon !
This month has been largely about data and data driven features/ understanding the user behaviors/patterns. We have been doing this exercise internally and I suggest its a must!
Then I came across this blog post on mindtheproduct. Its a very very well written and well explained blog.
http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2016/01/strange-user-behaviours-more-lessons-learned-at-mail-ru/
"Be open to real data, real user behavior and external events. Be ready to change your product to react to users’ new expectations, but also be open to the possibility of you being wrong. Don’t forget to double check your decisions, and be ready to test anything and everything possible. New real-life knowledge about your users will always result in a better product."
- Quoted from http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2016/01/strange-user-behaviours-more-lessons-learned-at-mail-ru/
Well its very easy to look at the data the way you want to look at it and completely ignore what the data is saying. So it is very very essential to remove "I love my product" hat or "I know that" hat or for that matter " This is so obvious" hat before looking at the data.
After spending half a day with tableau and looking at multiple visualizations , I felt lost but honestly thats where the GRAPH appeared and I did understand the problem. It is the data that will help me create the problem statement. More interestingly I wasn't looking to solve that problem , that problem was presented by the data.
I have genuine respect for all the data analysts/scientists ! These people can make supposedly non existing issue alive!!
If your product does give you access the usage data , average time on page , pattern of clicks and more such KPIs nothing like it. The big data in this case might provide more information than the thick data from the user interviews/interactions !
