It takes more than a good spellchecker or blind luck to make site content popular. So much of our time is spent on product development that it's easy to forget how customers fit into the process. Don't overlook the customer development process, however, because it's a great way to build a product to meet business goals.
Dmitry shared some of our
techniques on conversion in his post last month. If you don't know ZURB very well, you might assume that we're only focused on *using* customers to meet our business goals. While we enjoy making our business profitable, we're equally interested in making people enjoy using our sites and products.
We use touch points to figure out what drives a customer to behave a certain way. By looking at a scenario and mapping out important moments and touch points, we can see areas that customers might struggle with online. Here's a snippet to show you an example of the method.
Touchpoint Flow Example
The example above has the customer lifecycle drawn horizontally and important moments marked on the graph with letters. All other actions and details are listed vertically below to complete the touch point flow. It's important to note that these are often based on fictional personas- this technique works really well when you have no customers or know very little! Touchpoint flows are a great first step to identify where you might invest more time into research or prototyping your ideas.
