Validate Your Product!
When building software, we always fear not working software, errors, and other functional things. But deeper inside, we sometimes forget the biggest fear is our software failed to deliver the desired goals. This article will explain how La Casa De PPL validates our product.
Product Validation
Before going through, let’s talk about product validation itself. Product validation is a process of testing the software with potential users to get feedback on the product viability. Product validation aims to make sure every step we take in the development process won’t be a waste of time and energy. How do we do product validation in our team? Here’s how.
There will be three steps in most digital product validation: user mapping, understanding the market, and product testing with real users. These three steps are the basics, while the tools and the way can vary. Using those basics, our team decided to took a different approach to product validation by doing these three steps are: Customer Validation, System Benchmarking, and Concept Testing.
Customer Validation
When we create our digital product, we have to first know who our customers/users are. We start this phase by finding user segment of our software. Luckily, we have Mr. Mishbah, our lecturer, slash an early adopter of this system. We focus on users in this phase: who they are, their wants, needs, and problems. To understand more abour our user, we use various framework. In this case, we build persona and user journey maps to understand our users more. While those two frameworks try to describe the user in general, we also interview Mr. Mishbah as an early adopter of the system. Not only to understand the user, but we also gain more information on how the system should be.
System Benchmark
From the information we gained, we finally understand what things we have to develop and how we should deliver the product. To deliver better experience in our software, we do benchmark on similar systems. The benchmarking includes user experience, system analysis, and best practices on the technical framework. In our case, we benchmark several journal databases to know how’s the UX. We also looked closer to several webs in CSUI to understand how the UI was.
Concept Testing
We work in 4 different sprints in which in every sprint, we define what task will be done. At the end of every sprint, we do a sprint review to conduct a UAT or concept testing on the working software. We later ask our client if our current software suits the desired goals. In the sprint review, we heard some feedback for the working software from the client as well.
Currently, our software is still ongoing and will continuously do this product validation to helped us to gain reassurance from our client.
