The importance of doing user interviews For a product designer with Putri

Young, Scrappy, and Hungry is Typedream’s podcast where our founders talk about the product, stuff they’ve learned along the way, the founder mindset, and things they think about as immigrant startup founders in Silicon Valley.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4t8ZpTSnEL3XE44IeIu4Q3?si=5d5951e7c944409a

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-importance-of-doing-user-interviews-for/id1678220914?i=1000605098608

Full Transcript

Hi, I'm Putri. I hope you all know me. I'm usually in the front lines of building new features or products for Typedream.

About a week ago, I was stuck in designing something for our Link In Bio - the onboarding flow, specifically. I wasn't sure whether I should be focusing on optimizing it for people who want to show their socials or for people who want to sell their products. And I thought to myself, how do I not know who I'm building for? Well, I realized I wasn't really involved in the onboarding process.

Although my team gave me a really nice summary of those onboarding interviews, it doesn't feel the same as if I were to do those onboardings myself. I don't really know why they joined the waitlist or what this pain point is that they're experiencing and that they're willing to try a new solution.

I took a step back and thought about all of the features that we've built this past year and realized that we haven't really interviewed people before building those features. We also didn't interview our users after building those features and iterating on them. I realized we've been sort of disconnected from our users. Although we answer customer support and all that, we don't really know who is using us and what they're trying to accomplish with Typedream.

So I wrote down a couple of principles that would hopefully help me and my team with product decisions moving forward. A couple of those are making sure that our product is always simple and intuitive and also that we always care about our customers.

To do that, I have started to interview our users again - both our existing users and also the new users that come in from our Lincoln Bio product. Our mission has always been to empower people, builders, and creators who just want to build their own stuff and put it out there - especially those who don't have the coding or design skills required to make a great result.

I really hope that by starting to interview our users again, I could really design a product that solves their problems and just helps them accomplish their goals. Yeah, I'm really excited to see how this unfolds.