How important is user experience when you are still finding your product market fit? | Hacker News Reader

How important is user experience when you are still finding your product market fit?

3 pointsmingyeow6 comments

As a very young startup who is into our third complete revamp of our product, we are constantly facing a question - how much time should we spend on the UI?

The first couple of times we optimized the UI, it was all wasted, as it proved to be the wrong product from a high level point of view. Now on our third iteration, we find ourselves optimizing the UI too, because it is hard to get good feedback with a sucky UI.

Any thoughts?

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if you have excellent product-market fit, your early adopters will struggle through your terrible UI to get the incredible benefit they see from your product. If that's not happening, it's probably not the UI's fault.

Do an in-person usability test, where you can explain to the person exactly how to use the product (violating all the normal rules of usability testing). If they still don't like the product - either they are not a target customer or you don't have any customers out there. Do the test again - if the same thing keeps happening, you know it's the latter.

Hey Eries, thanks! Do you have any examples (whether it is yourself or someone else) with this experience?

Oh yes, many many times. It works, if you have the stamina to stick it out (it's painful).

If you are on your third revamp of a product and you don't know what your "market fit" is, you have a serious problem. Why do you have a product with no understanding of your market? Maybe you don't have a market. But, wait, you have a product. Hmm. Looks like the cart before the horse.

Hmmm.... i am not sure if that is a fair statement to make. Most startups spend lots of time developing their product, and do not find a market at the end.

We know there is definitely a market - the problem is that it is not easy to build a product for it, hence we are trying to re-iterate to the right product-market fit.

you should know your market and have good predictions of uptake before you start coding ...

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