Understanding your users pt.2

Continuing from the last post, where we try to understand what I wanted to solve with my pollution notification bot. Now that I know my need, next I want to understand what other people in my family want from this notification bot.

At first, I set the bot to announce the pollution level every hour, but should I announce it every hour, 24/7? Would someone be likely to read the notification and benefits from it at midnight? Most likely not.

I know my parents like to take a stroll with my nephew at around 5 and not later than 6 in the afternoon since it’s getting too dark after that time. And my parents are early birds, they usually wake up after 3 or 4 in the morning, but they would go out walking probably after 6 am. or something. So I set my notification period to start from 6 am. and end at 7 pm. We likely not gonna need to know the pollution level outside that time period.

One day, my brother, out of the blue, just asked me if I can have the bot just told the pollution level once every few hours? Hmmm, that’s a weirdly specific request. Why would he want that? What did he truly want?

Then I think deeply, my brother, a doctor, working tirelessly, but still spare some time to catch up on our family group chat. He likely doesn’t want to be spammed by the bot notification during his working hour. After that realization, I got to work.

With luck on my side, I found out that there’s a way to not create a notification when broadcasting a message, so I change the bot behavior so that when the pollution level isn’t that critical, the message will be sent without notifying users in the group chat, only when the pollution level is critical, we will both broadcast and notify all people in the group chat.

With that out of the way, I didn’t just blindly followed my brother’s request, but truly captured his need with a different solution.

Building products is no different, you can’t just take the user feature requests at face value, you need to think deeply and understand their root cause of problems, so you could create solutions that could solve a set of problems holistically.

In the next episode, we will still be seeking to understand our users and emphasizing with them.