The lead users of a product are those who use it the most. They are also the first to ‘break’ the product, or find limitations in it. Increasingly, they’re more likely to blog about those weaknesses or limitations, and even fix some of them.

It has never been easier to be near those who will adopt your product. Using some simple techniques borrowed from Anthropology, you can find out exactly what your consumer needs, and how to implement it. All you need to do is find the earliest adopters and lead users of a product in your niche and observe what they are saying about the product. Once you’ve developed a product from their advice, you’ll find a lot of other consumers adopting that product as well.

Why does this happen? The needs of lead users are the future needs of mass consumers in a given niche.

The key is to follow the advice of the most voracious adopters first. Bring your product to a shared work location like Portland’s Cubespace, where dozens of supporters will be poised and ready to give constructive feedback and advice. Ask this group of people what they find themselves frustrated with. What current limitations do they face in technology? Follow them around for a day, and, with their permission write down what they do. What is efficient? What is not? What products do they keep coming back to again and again?

Then, pick a problem and engineer a solution. Market that solution, and test it with the lead users. If it fails, it’s probably not going to move to the next stage of early adopters and routine users. Who were the lead users of Twitter? Why did they find Twitter to be useful? Did it help them communicate during their travels to tech conferences around the world?

Product development is about asking a lot of questions, and engaging yourself with your consumer’s needs. You can’t just get a group of geniuses together in a conference room and tell them “lets develop a product!”  I’ve done that countless times, and it is really fun, but creating a product seperately from the consumer’s input is generally a hit-or-miss process that often ends up in tears.

Embed yourself in your target market. Invest your time researching the consumer’s needs. This product is for them, not you. The more you make it for them, the more they will like you. Product development is engineering success by engagement and inference.

Websites generally annoy me. I tend to keep them out of the way by using RSS readers and other objects that strip important data while leaving messy interfaces behind. The fields of Usability, User Interaction, Experience and Interface Design and Information Architecture host a bunch of battlebots out to eviscerate design travesties wherever possible.

The only problem is that many clients have a fog of war when it comes to understanding website design beyond the fact that a site “must be pretty”, or “must have flash”. Some do not understand that users are coming to the site and have only seconds to vote. A poorly designed site will have most people voting with the Back, Stumble, or Ctrl+W commands.

Enter Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form. He’s an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. where he leads the design of Yahoo.com and other popular products including My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Buzz.

Luke Wroblewski says:

In today’s social, distributed, search-driven Web, customers are finding their way to Web content through an increasing number of distinct experiences. Yet when people arrive at most Web pages, the experience they get isn’t optimized for this context. Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned with their own context than the context of their users: where did a user arrive from and where are they likely to go next? These pages remain designed as if they were primarily accessed from a Web site’s home page or a carefully thought-out selection from the site’s information architecture.”

“To address these issues and more, this talk outlines a set of best practices for Web content page design that focuses on appropriate presentations of content, context, and calls to action. Specifically: how can content be optimized to meet user expectations as they arrive from a diverse number of access points; what is the minimum amount of context required to frame content appropriately; how can the most relevant calls to action be presented to maximize user engagement? Applying these considerations enables information architects to deliver content experiences that take full advantage of emerging opportunities online and the existing assets within their Web sites.”

Resources

Download the Audio of Luke’s IA Summit 2008 Talk (Thanks to Boxes and Arrows for hosting).

Download the Slides of Luke’s IA Summit 2008 Talk

More about Luke Wroblewski:

Luke is the author of two popular Web design books: Web Form Design (2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (2002). He also publishes Functioning Form, a leading online publication for interaction designers. Luke is consistently a top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and is a co-founder and former Board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who lives in Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail or @caseorganic on Twitter.