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Comment se démarquer lors d'entretiens comportementaux en ingénierie

Comment se démarquer lors d’entretiens comportementaux en ingénierie

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Pour se démarquer lors d’un entretien comportemental en ingénierie, il est important de se préparer et de montrer ses compétences. Faites une bonne impression et démontrez vos capacités !

## Comment utiliser le format STAR pour répondre aux questions comportementales

Après avoir mené des entretiens avec des centaines d’ingénieurs et de gestionnaires d’ingénierie chez Meta, Twitter et d’autres entreprises, j’ai remarqué des modèles communs dans la façon dont les candidats abordaient les questions d’entretien comportemental. Alors que de nombreux candidats se sont bien débrouillés sur le plan technique, ils ont souvent eu du mal à articuler leur travail, leurs réalisations et leurs défis lors d’un entretien, ce qui a entraîné des refus.

Cet article aborde les conseils pour utiliser efficacement le format STAR largement connu pour répondre aux questions comportementales. Il aborde les pièges courants et fournit des exemples illustratifs pour aider les candidats à comprendre comment utiliser le format STAR pour communiquer clairement et se démarquer. C’est le cadre qui m’a aidé à passer avec succès des entretiens de direction technique chez Databricks, Twitter, Airbnb, Plaid, Notion, Uber et d’autres entreprises.

Le format STAR est une méthode très utile pour répondre aux questions comportementales lors des entretiens. Il permet aux candidats de structurer leurs réponses et de fournir des informations complètes et précises. La méthode STAR est basée sur quatre étapes : Situation, Tâche, Action et Résultat. Chaque étape est essentielle pour répondre à une question comportementale et fournir une réponse complète.

Lorsque vous répondez à une question comportementale en utilisant la méthode STAR, vous devez commencer par décrire la situation ou le contexte dans lequel vous avez travaillé. Vous devez ensuite expliquer la tâche à laquelle vous avez été confronté et comment vous l’avez abordée. Ensuite, vous devez expliquer les actions que vous avez prises pour résoudre le problème. Enfin, vous devez expliquer les résultats obtenus grâce à votre travail. Il est important de se rappeler que les résultats doivent être quantifiables et mesurables.

Par exemple, si un recruteur vous demande comment vous avez contribué à améliorer la base de données d’une entreprise, vous pouvez utiliser la méthode STAR pour répondre à cette question. Vous pouvez commencer par expliquer la situation : «J’ai été embauché par une entreprise pour améliorer sa base de données.» Vous pouvez ensuite expliquer la tâche : «Ma tâche consistait à analyser la base de données existante et à identifier les lacunes.» Ensuite, vous pouvez expliquer les actions que vous avez prises : «J’ai analysé la base de données et j’ai identifié plusieurs lacunes. J’ai ensuite mis en œuvre des modifications pour améliorer la qualité et la performance de la base de données.» Enfin, vous pouvez expliquer les résultats obtenus : «Grâce à mes modifications, la base de données a été améliorée de 10 % en termes de qualité et de performance.»

En conclusion, l’utilisation du format STAR est un excellent moyen pour les candidats de structurer leurs réponses aux questions comportementales lors des entretiens. Il permet aux candidats de communiquer clairement leurs réalisations et leurs

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10 Key Principles of User-Centered Design

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Many firms’ design and development decisions are increasingly oriented toward human-centered innovation. Instead of rushing goods to market, these firms are using a user-centered design approach.

Design and development teams build high-performing digital products or websites that uniquely meet customers’ demands by concentrating on the user experience. After all, a good web design is helpful in boosting the business reputation or user experience.

This post will define user-centered design, discuss its fundamental principles, and describe the user-centered design process.

What Is User-Centered Design?

To create an enjoyable solution to a problem, user-centered design is a collection of iterative design processes concentrating on the user’s needs at each step. In UCD, the expectations, objectives, and preferences of the user significantly impact design decisions.

Additionally, users are actively involved in the entire process from start to finish. User-centered design principles encourage designers to create products with users rather than just for them. This strategy typically includes user research, interviews, usability testing, and a massive amount of feedback gathering.

UCD Requires Four Fundamental Components:

  • Visibility: Can people see what your website is about and how to utilize it the moment they land on your page?
  • Availability: Is your website user-friendly? Can they swiftly locate information? They should be able to find call-to-action buttons, menus, filters, and search choices with ease.
  • Legibility: Is the text simple to read for users?
  • Language: Is the language simple to grasp for users? Do you avoid using industry jargon in your UX authoring, which might lead to confusion and hesitation?

What Is The Significance Of UCD?

User experience is important in product design, especially in digital products such as app design, web and interface design, and marketing. Customers want their lives to be simplified. A website, app, or product exists to fulfill a consumer. Hence its success is determined by their interaction with it.

The following are some of the advantages of a user-centered design strategy for a business:

  • Customers keep coming back for more
  • There would be an increase in sales
  • Creating polished, efficient, and widely available goods
  • Understanding challenges thoroughly to provide suitable solutions
  • Customers and teams working together
  • Avoiding typical blunders
  • Enhancing Competitiveness
  • Assisting them in comprehending their market

It offers consumers the following advantages:

  • Making their life easier
  • Fulfilling their desires
  • Companies making them feel heard and understood
  • Making them feel important in the creation of things they use
  • Providing answers to challenges they were unaware they had or could not imagine solutions to

Let’s dig in to learn more about the advantages of UCD.

Businesses can benefit from using the user-centered design approach in various ways. As you incorporate this into your web development, you can enjoy the following four main advantages.

1. Prevent Project Failure

Your company might find it simpler to incorporate improvements and ensure your product is in line with actual user needs if you have a continuous feedback process assessing how customers react to your product, like a website.

Customers feel like their needs are better represented in the finished product, which can increase engagement and strengthen the bond with the company.

2. Improve ROI

This method produces products that more accurately reflect user expectations. The procedure also lessens mistakes made by website users, for instance. When combined, these factors motivate users to convert from leads to paying clients, boosting return on investment.

3. Increase Development Efficiency

In user-centered design, the objectives of the various team members are aligned. This can help clarify the best course of action for all parties involved. A more targeted, goal-oriented development process may be encouraged by the regular evaluation process.

Additionally, businesses can engage stakeholders and explain how their efforts and methodologies will improve customer interactions by using an iterative life cycle during product development.

4. Up The Level Of Competition

Customers will more fully appreciate what you offer, improve their engagement with your product or website, and be more likely to purchase from you if your product is created with their needs and expectations in mind.

As a result, this may increase your ability to compete in your sector.

5. KPIs Are Included

Given your user needs and business objectives, how do you move from the first to the second? You can measure key performance indicators with this in mind once you know what user needs are essential for the overall goals.

For instance, productivity may be the focus of office software, shopper activity may be the focus of sales tools, and retention rates may be the focus of other apps. All of these are necessary steps toward achieving business values like profit and revenue.

Human-Centered Design Versus User-Centered Design

There is a significant difference between humans and users. Simply put, all users are humans; however, not all humans will use your product. Therefore, you must thoroughly understand your target market to produce a successful user-centered design.

Detailed research should be done on the problems and goals of your users. Then, talk to them and give them several chances to offer feedback. By doing this, you’ll create a user persona that is complete and that you can use to determine the priorities for your design.

It’s critical to understand that different user groups may have additional requirements, levels of technical expertise, and expectations for using products like the one you’ve made.

What crucial guidelines or principles should designers consider when adopting a user-centric design?

The Process Of User-Centered Design

Certain fundamental principles underpin user-centered design. While the development process is always iterative, no explicit methods for implementation are specified. The approach can be implemented in either a waterfall or an agile environment.

1. Contextualization

The first step is to analyze the environment in which users will use the product. What are the intended applications of the product for future users? Teams working on projects can get answers by watching and talking to potential users.

2. Outlining The Prerequisites

Specifying the requirements for the new product is the second step. In this step, user requirements are described while considering corporate needs.

3. Design

Once the requirements are established, the actual design process can begin. Designers typically start by producing a straightforward prototype, like one made of paper, then move on to digital wireframes and a finished prototype.

4. Analysis

The project team solicits feedback from potential users after creating a prototype. This is typically done for digital applications through in-depth user testing and qualitative research.

Do surveys and tests evaluate user satisfaction, effectiveness, and efficiency? With the new information, the project team goes back to step 2 or step 3 of the design process to improve the product. Once the user feedback is satisfied, these iterations continue while taking into account corporate frameworks (time and costs).

Top 10 User-Centered Design Principles

Principles of user-centered design attempt to guarantee that usability is the primary priority throughout the development process. These principles, if successfully followed, will ensure that user experience is fulfilled not just during the initial introduction of a product but also during its use.

Furthermore, each of the following principles may be tailored to match the specific requirements and interaction demands of any product.

1. Use Simple Language

Professional Web Designer strives to provide the most readable discourse for the user while creating a product. This involves clarifying vocabulary, eliminating jargon, and simply providing information pertinent to the work.

Presenting users with irrelevant information throughout their use of the product taints its usefulness. Furthermore, basic language helps the user finish the work without being overwhelmed or confused.

2. Feedback

Users expect a reaction to all of their actions. This might involve modifying the look of the screen after completing an activity. If the job is finished after some time, it should display a loading page to notify the user that the task is in process.

Keeping the user informed throughout the process reassures them and keeps them on track with their job.

3. Maintaining Consistency

Keeping the product consistent is essential in ensuring an ideal user experience. Consistency affects how customers approach a product, and the time it takes to learn how to use it.

From the start of the project until its completion, the consistent philosophy underpinning the UCD process should be maintained. If the interface design needs to be updated, it is critical to maintaining consistency across new features to stay beneficial to the user.

4. Give The Complete User Control

Consumers are already aware of their requirements. They should be able to use a product with minimal effort and depend on the product’s help to accomplish the rest.

By removing the effort from the job, the user can do it quickly while keeping control of their activities.

5. Describe The Situation

Before developing a product, the designer must first investigate the ideal user and their wants. The designers can gain a comprehensive sense of some of the issues these people experience by studying their lifestyles.

Many of these observations are conducted through interviews. These interviews provide the designer with information on the exact goals that users want to attain and how they want to achieve them.

6. Examine the Design

Designers undertake usability testing with actual users of their product at this stage in the UCD process. This stage provides designers with insight into how consumers will interact with the product and how to modify it to suit them better.

It is advised that this stage be completed as quickly as feasible. The sooner customers provide input, the faster designers can comprehend their product from the user’s perspective.

7. Create Designs That Are Specific To The Needs Of The User

The design team must examine the distinctive features of their intended demographic as well as frequent real-world activities while beginning the design process. Furthermore, the product should be appropriate for the environment in which it will be utilized the most.

Making a product that needs a lot of work from the user reduces its usability and usefulness, ultimately defeating the objective of UCD.

8. The Design Process Is Iterative

Because user-centered design is based on putting the user first, the product team should constantly be working to improve the user experience. By introducing changes gradually, you will gain a better understanding of your target audience.

9. Adequate Navigational Tools

An essential component of the user experience is the capability to navigate between pages of your website and return to the previous one. Make sure users know where they are on your website and how to leave any pages they don’t want to see.

Customers can better understand how to navigate your page by giving them features like a navigation map, for instance. Make it simple for customers to change their order without leaving the current page if they buy clothing and discover they need a different size once they reach the checkout page.

10. Unflawed System

Customers should find it easy to navigate between your website’s pages and accomplish their goals. If they make a mistake, be there to help them fix it so they can achieve their goal.

The form may ask for specific, essential fields, such as the square footage, and may also include a gentle reminder or an alert that appears if the user accidentally leaves a required field blank.

Customers may feel more comfortable responding to your prompts and participating in a conversation if you ask questions one at a time and offer automated responses for each response.

Wrapping Up

User-centered design is more than just making a good product. It goes further than that. You demonstrate your motivations and intentions by putting your users in the spotlight. You’re demonstrating that it’s not all about meeting deadlines or turning a profit. Instead, you’re telling your users that you understand what they want and prioritize their needs.

It should come as no surprise that the most effective teams are user-centric. Knowing your customer is essential for success in any industry, including design. Create products that put the user first, and you will create products that people will love.

You can build a more robust, user-friendly website that is better equipped to respond to user needs and expectations by incorporating the User Centered Design process into your product design. However, it’s crucial to collaborate with a specialist who can apply these techniques and produce the result you’ve envisioned.

 

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My Favorite Resources for System Design Interviews

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Hello devs, if you are preparing for a system design interview and looking for the best resources to master software design and system design, then you have come to the right place. 

Earlier, I shared the best System Courses, Books, and System Interview Questions, and in this article, I will share the best places to learn system design.

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What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product?

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“Minimum Viable Product,” or “MVP,” is a concept of agile development and business growth. With a minimum viable product, you focus on creating the simplest, most basic version of your product, web application, or code possible.

Minimum viable products include just enough features to attract early adopters and validate your idea in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Choosing an MVP workflow can be particularly valuable in the software environment because it helps teams receive, learn from, and respond to feedback as quickly as possible.

The question is, how exactly do you define the “minimum” in MVP? How do you know if your MVP creation is basic enough while still being “viable”?

Defining the Minimum Viable Product: An Introduction

The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” comes from the Lean Start-up Methodology, introduced by Eric Ries. The purpose of MVP is to help companies quickly create versions of a product while collecting validated insights from customers for each iteration. Companies may choose to develop and release minimum viable products because they want to:

  • Introduce new products into the market as quickly as possible;
  • Test an idea with real users before committing a large budget to product development;
  • Create a competitive product with the use of frequent upgrades;
  • Learn what resonates with the target market of the company;
  • Explore different versions of the same product.

Aside from allowing your company to validate an idea for a product without building the entire concept from scratch, an MVP can also reduce the demand on a company’s time and resources. This is why so many smaller start-ups with limited budgets use the MVP and lean production strategy to keep costs as low as possible.

Defining an MVP: What your Minimum Viable Product Isn’t

When you’re building a Minimum Viable Product, you’re concentrating on developing only the most “essential” features that need to be in that product. For instance, you might be building a shopping app for a website. For the app to be “viable,” it would need to allow customers to search through products and add them to a basket or shopping cart. The app would also need a checkout feature and security components.

However, additional functionality, like the ability to send questions about an item to a customer service team or features that allow clients to add products to a “wish list,” may not be necessary straight away. Part of defining a minimum viable product is understanding what it isn’t. For instance, an MVP is not:

  • A prototype: Prototypes are often mentioned alongside MVPs because they can help with early-stage product validation. However, prototypes are generally not intended for customers to use. The “minimum” version of a viable product still needs to be developed enough for clients and users to put it to the test and provide feedback.
  • A minimum marketable product: An MVP is a learning vehicle that allows companies to create various iterations of an item over time. However, a minimum marketable product is a complete item, ready to sell, with features or “selling points” the company can highlight to differentiate the item from the competition.
  • Proof of concept: This is another similar but distinct idea from MVP. Proof of concept items test an idea you have to determine whether it’s attainable. There usually aren’t any customers involved in this process. Instead, companies create small projects to assess business solutions’ technical capabilities and feasibility. You can sometimes use a proof of concept before moving on to an MVP.

Finding the Minimum in your MVP

When finding the “minimum” in a minimum viable product, the primary challenge is ensuring the right balance. Ideally, you need your MVP to be as essential, cost-effective, and straightforward as possible so that you can create several iterations in a short space of time. The simpler the product, the easier it is to adapt it, roll it out to your customers, and learn from their feedback.

However, developers and business leaders shouldn’t get so caught up focusing on the “Minimum” part of Minimum Viable Product that they forget the central segment: “Viable”; your product still needs to achieve a specific purpose.

So, how do you find the minimum in your MVP?

1. Decide on Your Goal or Purpose

First, you’ll need to determine what your product needs to do to be deemed viable. What goal or target do you hope to achieve with your new product? For instance, in the example we mentioned above, where you’re creating an ecommerce shopping app, the most basic thing the app needs to do is allow customers to shop for and purchase items on a smartphone.

Consider the overall selling point of your product or service and decide what the “nice to haves” are, compared to the essential features. For instance, your AR app needs to allow people to interact with augmented digital content on a smartphone, but it may not need to work with all versions of the latest AR smart glasses.

2. Make a List of Features

Once you know the goal or purpose of your product, the next step is to make a list of features or capabilities you can rank according to importance. You can base your knowledge of what’s “most important” for your customers by looking at things like:

  • Competitor analysis: What do your competitors already offer in this category, and where are the gaps in their service or product?
  • User research: Which features or functionalities are most important to your target audience? How can you make your solution stand out from the crowd?
  • Industry knowledge: As an expert in your industry, you should have some basic understanding of what it will take to make your product “usable.”

3. Create Your Iterations

Once you’ve defined your most important features, the next stage is simply building the simplest version of your product. Build the item according to what you consider to be its most essential features and ask yourself whether it’s serving its purpose.

If your solution seems to be “viable,” you can roll it out to your target audience or a small group of beta testers to get their feedback and validate the offering. Use focus groups and market interviews to collect as much information as possible about what people like or dislike.

Using your feedback, you can begin to implement changes to your “minimum” viable product to add more essential features or functionality.

Understanding the “Minimum Viable Product”

Minimum viable products are evident throughout multiple industries and markets today – particularly in the digitally transforming world. For instance, Amazon might be one of the world’s most popular online marketplaces today, but it didn’t start that way. Instead, Jeff Bezos began purchasing books from distributors and shipping them to customers every time his online store received an order to determine whether the book-selling landscape would work.

When Foursquare first began, it had only one feature. People could check-in at different locations and win badges. The gamification factor was what made people so excited about using the service. Other examples include:

  • Groupon: Groupon is a pretty huge discount and voucher platform today, operating in companies all around the world. However, it started life as a simple minimum viable product promoting the services of local businesses and offering exclusive deals for a short time. Now Groupon is constantly evolving and updating its offerings.
  • Airbnb: Beginning with the use of the founders’ own apartment, Airbnb became a unicorn company giving people the opportunity to list places for short-term rental worldwide. The founders rented out their own apartment to determine whether people would consider staying in someone else’s home before eventually expanding.
  • Facebook: Upon release, Facebook was a simple social media tool used for connecting with friends. Profiles were basic, and all members were students of Harvard University. The idea quickly grew and evolved into a global social network. Facebook continues to learn from the feedback of its users and implement new features today.

Creating Your Minimum Viable Product

Your definition of a “minimum viable product” may not be the same as the definition chosen by another developer or business leader. The key to success is finding the right balance between viability – and the purpose of your product, and simplicity – or minimizing your features.

Start by figuring out what your product simply can’t be without, and gradually add more features as you learn and gain feedback from your audience. While it can be challenging to produce something so “minimalistic” at first, you need to be willing to release those small and consistent iterations if you want to leverage all the benefits of an MVP.

Suppose you can successfully define the meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable” simultaneously with your new product creations. In that case, the result should be an agile business, lean workflows, and better development processes for your entire team.

 

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How to Get Started With UX Research

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The importance of scientific research cannot be overstated. User research is crucial to the success of any UX design, and this article will explain all the reasons why.

But first, we will explore what UX research is and how it can give you valuable tools. Then we will analyze why user research is an ongoing, dynamic process.

By the end of this 5-minute read, you will know every efficient research method (qualitative and quantitative) and how to choose the right one(s) for a new or existing UX project.

What is UX Research?

In a few words, we could say that UX research is about observation techniques, feedback methods, and analysis of the whole user experience of a project. As in any scientific research, UX research analyzes how users think and what their motivations and needs are.

The research methods of UX can be divided into two main types: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative Research Methods

These methods are all about statistics and focus on numbers, percentages, and mathematical observations. UX designers later transform such numerical data into useful statistics that you can use in UX designs.

To be precise, there are numerous data collection platforms that UX designers use like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, etc.

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research aims to understand people’s needs and motivations through observation. This includes numerous methods: from interviews and usability testing to ethnographic and field studies.

In general, qualitative research is crucial for us UX designers because it is easier to analyze than quantitative and we can use it quickly in our projects.

Why is UX Research an Ongoing Process?

Suppose you are about to create a UX wireframe. The process is pretty simple. You start with research, proceed with sketching, then prototype and build. But how many times have you gone back to the previous step of the process?

A UX design is completely dynamic and rarely finished. For this reason, UX research should be viewed as an ongoing process. When I stopped worrying about going through this loop over and over again, I immediately became a better UX designer.

Why Should You Invest in UX Research? 

There are many reasons why you should always conduct UX research before you start sketching and prototyping a wireframe:

  1. Stay relevant: Via UX research, you will ensure that you understand what your users need and tailor your product accordingly.
  2. Improve user experience: With comprehensive UX research, you’ll be one step closer to delivering a great user experience.
  3. Clarify your projects: With UX research, you can quickly identify the features you need to prioritize.
  4. Improve revenue, performance, and credibility: When you successfully use UX research, you can boost the ROI (Return on Investment).

9 Effective UX Research Methods  

It becomes clear that UX research is very important to the success of any UX project. All successful approaches derive from three basic foundations: Observation, understanding, and analysis.

So let us take a look at the most popular and effective qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Interviews 

UX designers can conduct one-on-one interviews to communicate with users and analyze the context of the project. This is a very effective UX research method. You just need to set your goals.

  • Difficulty: Medium/Low
  • Cost: Average
  • Phase: Predesign, During Design Phase

Surveys And Questionnaires

This is a very effective approach if you want to gather valuable information quickly. There are many tools like PandaDoc and Wufoo that allow you to create engaging questionnaires and surveys.

  • Difficulty: Low
  • Cost: Low
  • Phase: Predesign, Post Design Phase

Usability Tests

Usability testing is an essential method if you want to test your product in terms of user experience. It can be applied during or after the creation of an app, site, etc.

  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Cost: Average
  • Phase: During Design Phase

A/B Tests

A/B testing is by far the best way to overcome a dilemma. If you do not know which element to choose, all you have to do is organize an A/B test and show each version to a number of users. Based on their feedback, you can then decide which version is the best.

  • Difficulty: Low
  • Cost: Low
  • Phase: During Design Phase

Card Sorts 

With card sorts, you can help your users by providing them with some product content categories (labeled card sets). This is a very cheap and easy way to understand what your users prefer and how they interact with the content you have just designed.

  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Cost: Average
  • Phase: During Design Phase

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing what your competitors are doing differently is critical to the initial stages of a UX design. This will help you identify their strengths and weaknesses and optimize your product.

  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Cost: Average
  • Phase: Predesign

Persona And Scenario Building 

Creating a user persona and a specific scenario for your project is critical. First, you need to build a user persona by integrating the motives, needs, and goals of your target audience.

Then, you can create a scenario that leverages all of this valuable information to deliver a top-notch user experience.

  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Cost: Average
  • Phase: Predesign

Field Studies 

Although a field study is a very effective UX research method, it is also expensive and difficult to conduct. However, there is nothing like field research when it comes to obtaining real-life data.

  • Difficulty: High
  • Cost: High
  • Phase: Predesign, During Design Phase

Tree Tests

Tree testing is a UX research method that you can apply to your designs during or after the construction phase. The process is fairly simple: you provide users with a text-only version of your product and ask them to complete certain tasks. This tactic is a great way to validate your product’s architecture.

  • Difficulty: High
  • Cost: High
  • Phase: During and Post Design Phase

How to Choose the Right UX Research Method?

Good planning is the most important thing for us UX designers. If you know exactly what the UX problem is, you can solve it quickly.

The methods analyzed above are just some of the research tactics used by UX designers. Choosing the right user research method for a project is not easy. To do so, you should first define your goals.

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How to Get Started with the MVP Workflow

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Few things are more important to a web designer or developer’s chances of success than having the proper workflow. The term “workflow” applies to the set of standardized steps you or your company uses to create, test, and deploy designs or products.

Over the years, as development processes have evolved, so too have the workflows experts use to bring their ideas to life. The MVP workflow, or “Minimum Viable Product” strategy, is one of the most popular options in 2022.

Here’s what you need to know about the MVP workflow and how it differs from some of the other standard workflows developers may be used to.

What is the Designer/Developer Workflow?

As mentioned above, the designer/developer workflow is a series of steps used by experts in the web design world to achieve a creative goal. The process includes the steps taken to start a project, evolve it, and finish it. Since software is never developed without tools, the technology you’ll access throughout the development process is also considered in most workflows.

An example of a standard development workflow might look like this:

  • Scaffolding: This is the stage wherein you start your new web project, creating a git repo, downloading libraries, preparing file structures, and completing other tasks to make sure your product is ready to roll out into the world.
  • Develop: This is where you’ll spend most of your time writing code for your application or website. The development process may include various specific tools and support from other staff members.
  • Test: In this stage, you examine the functionality of your code to determine if everything works as it should. If there are errors or issues, you can go back and develop fixes to the potential problems. Your code may go through the development/test process several times before you can move to the next stage.
  • Integrate: This is when you merge the code for your part of the development process with the rest of the team. You can also integrate your code into websites and existing apps at this point. If you’re working solo, you can skip this process.
  • Optimize: You prepare all your assets for use on a production server during the optimization stage. Files are generally optimized to ensure your visitors can view your site easily or access your applications with ease.
  • Deploy: In the deployment stage, developers push code and assets up into the server and allow for changes to be viewed by the public.

What is MVP? (Minimum Viable Product)

Now you know what a developer workflow looks like, you can begin to assess the concept of the “MVP” workflow. The term “MVP” stands for Minimum Viable Product.

The idea of “Minimum Viable Product” applies to a range of industries, from education to healthcare and government entities. This term comes from lean start-up practices and focuses heavily on the value of learning and changing during the development process.

When you adapt your workflow to focus on an MVP, you’re essentially adjusting your focus to a point where you can create a stripped-back version of something new – like an app or a website. The MVP is built just with the core features (the minimum), so you can bring the idea to market and test it as quickly as possible.

For instance, if your goal were to create an attractive new website for a client, an MVP would focus on implementing the crucial initial tools, and nothing else. While you may create checkout pages, product pages, and other aspects of the site, you wouldn’t populate it with content or start experimenting with bonus widgets and apps.

So, how does this offer a better alternative to the standard workflow?

Simply put, an MVP workflow is quick, agile, and easy. The idea is you can validate key concepts with speed, fail quickly, and learn just as fast. Rather than having to build an entire app and almost start over from scratch every time you find an error, you can race through the iteration and development process.

MVP workflows are also highly appealing to start-ups and entrepreneurs hoping to validate ideas without a massive amount of upfront investment.

Examples of MVP Workflows

Still confused? The easiest way to understand how an MVP workflow works is to look at an example.

Let’s start with a conceptual example. Say you were building a voice transcription service for businesses. The desired features of this product might include the ability to download transcription, translate them into different languages, and integrate them into AI analytics tools.

However, using the MVP approach, you wouldn’t try to accomplish all of your goals with your software at once. Instead, you’d focus on something simple first – like the ability to download the transcripts. Once you confirm you can do that, you can start a new workflow for the next most important feature for the app.

One excellent example of a company with an MVP approach is Airbnb. The entrepreneurs behind this unicorn company, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, didn’t have a lot of cash to build a business with at first. They had to use their own apartment to validate the idea of creating a website where people could share their available “space” in a home or apartment with the public.

To begin, Airbnb only created a very basic website, published photos of their property, and waited to see the results. After discovering people were genuinely interested in renting another person’s home, the company was able to begin experimenting with new ideas to make a site where people could list their properties for travelers.

The Pros and Cons of an MVP Workflow

There are a lot of benefits to the MVP workflow – particularly when it comes to gaining agility and developing new products quickly. However, there are downsides too.

Pros

  • With an MVP approach, you can maximize your learning opportunities and create a more innovative, successful product at speed. You get to test every step of the way.
  • You release iterations or versions of your product quickly, which means you discover problems faster, allowing you to quickly solve these issues.
  • You build on the benefits of customer fans, “evangelists” in the marketplace who are keen to help your product or service grow.
  • An MVP gives you more freedom to try out unique ideas and “risks” you might otherwise avoid with a traditional workflow.
  • Because you’re focusing on creating only the “minimum viable product,” you don’t have to spend a fortune on initially setting up your workflows.

Cons

  • Agile work with an MVP flow requires a lot of effort in collecting constant feedback from customers and releasing iterations.
  • You’ll need to dedicate yourself to releasing many small and frequent product releases on a tight schedule.
  • You might have to revise the functionality of your product or app a number of times.

Creating Your MVP Workflow

If you believe an MVP workflow might be effective for you, the first step is defining your “Minimum Viable Product.” The app, website, or product you design needs to align with your team’s strategic goals, so think about what your company is trying to achieve at this moment – before you get started. If you have limited resources, or specific purposes, like improving your reputation as a reliable company, now might not be the right time to develop a new MVP.

Ask what purpose your minimum viable product will serve and what kind of market you’re going to be targeting. You’ll need to know your target customer to help you test the quality and performance of each iteration of your MVP. Once you know what your ideal “product” is, ask yourself what the most important features will be.

You can base these decisions on things like:

  • User research
  • Competitive analysis
  • Feedback from your audience

For example, if you’re producing an AI chatbot that helps companies to sort through customer inquiries, the most important “initial feature” may be the ability to integrate that bot into existing websites and apps owned by the company.

MVP Approach Guidelines

Once you have your hierarchy of most valuable features for your minimum viable product, you can translate this into an action plan for development. Remember, although you’re focusing on the “minimum” in development, your product still needs to be “viable.” In other words, it still needs to allow your customer to achieve a specific goal.

  • Review your features: Reviewing your prioritized product requirements and the minimum level of functionality you can deliver with each of these “features.” You need to ensure you’re still providing value to your customer with anything you produce.
  • Build your solution: Build your minimum set of features for the product or service. Remember to build only what is required. You can use methodologies like the agile or waterfall method to help guide your team during this process.
  • Validate your solution: Release your offering into the market, and ensure you have tools in place to gather feedback from early adopters. Use beta programs, focus groups, and market interviews to understand how your solution works for your customers and where you can improve on your current offer.
  • Release new iterations: Based on what you learn from your target audience, release improvements to your product quickly. Use your validation strategies to collect information from your audience with each release.
  • Review again: Go back to your product requirements and desired features and start the process over again, this time focusing on the next most valuable functionality. Over time, the value of your minimum viable product will increase.

Using the MVP Workflow Approach

While the MVP workflow approach might not be the right solution for every development or design team, it can work very effectively in the right circumstances. The MVP approach doesn’t minimize the importance of understanding market problems and delivering value. Instead, the focus is on delivering quick value that gradually increases and evolves over time.

As many developers and designers know, the most useful form of product validation in most cases is real-world validation. When your customers have had an opportunity to use a product on a day-to-day basis, they can provide much more effective feedback.

Just keep in mind that committing to the MVP approach also means changing your workflow and committing to iterations – otherwise, other features may never be completed. You’ll need to be willing to work quickly and in small bursts without getting too heavily caught up in one feature or functionality.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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URL Shortener Complete Tutorial

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Introduction

A URL shortener is a service that is used to create short links from very long URLs. Usually, short links have the size of one-third or even one-fourth of the original URL, which makes them easier to type, present, or tweet. Clicking on a short link user will be automatically redirected to the original URL. 

There are many URL shortening services available online, such as tiny.cc, bitly.com, and cutt.ly. Implementing a URL shortening service is not a complex task, and it is often part of system design interviews. In this post, I will try to explain the process of implementing the service. 

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6 Tips for Collecting Customer Feedback (The Right Way)

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Feedback is one of the most valuable resources for any business. Informative messages from your customers can tell you a lot about your company. They’re a way to check that your service strategies are paying off and a chance to learn which parts of your product need an upgrade.

Reviews and testimonials can also help you better understand your audience and the kind of solutions they’re looking for with your brand. 

Solid feedback is also how you improve your chances of gaining more customers in the long term. Brands with superior customer service generate about 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors. 

Of course, before you can begin tackling challenges like pulling trends from feedback or using your reviews to upgrade your business, you have one essential task to consider: How are you going to collect the valuable information your customers have to share?

There are a lot of options to choose from. You can reach out to clients individually with email messages or set up a feedback form on your website. You could even consider working with a review site to give your audience more options. 

Today, we will look at the steps you can take to collect customer feedback the right way.

Unlocking the Benefits of Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the information and input shared by your community. It provides a behind-the-scenes view of people’s interactions with your team and shows you where you need to focus on beginning driving new opportunities. 

Customer feedback becomes a guiding compass for your organization when used correctly. It shows you what you’re getting right and wrong from your customer’s perspective. Positive feedback can even become part of your marketing campaigns. User-generated content in the form of reviews and testimonials makes for excellent tools to encourage new people to purchase your products. 

Case studies and in-depth reviews from your clients can also help generate trust among potential customers, so you’re more likely to earn crucial sales. 

Only around 3% of customers say that they find marketers and salespeople “trustworthy.” This means that no matter how good your marketing messages might be, you’re only going to be able to accomplish so much with the claims you make about your brand. Ultimately, your clients will turn to other customers like them to determine who they should buy from.

On average, buyers read around seven reviews before they’ll even consider trusting a business. 

The good news is that around two-thirds of customers will share their personal information with a brand. Clients are happy to provide feedback in the right circumstances. It’s your job to ensure that the process is as easy as possible for your customers.

So, how do you get customer reviews?

1. Design an Effective Feedback Survey

The most obvious way to encourage feedback from your customers is to ask for it. Unfortunately, designing a good customer survey isn’t always as simple as it seems. 

On the one hand, you’re keen to gather as much information as possible from your customer, which could mean that you want to ask many questions. On the other hand, asking too many questions could easily scare your audience away. 

To improve your audience’s chances of actually sharing information, keep the feedback requests as simple as possible.

One or two questions at a time should be enough to give you some helpful information about customer preferences and expectations. When choosing what to include in your survey, remember:

  • Only ask essential questions: If the answer to a question isn’t going to help you achieve your goals, don’t ask it. You don’t need to know someone’s age if you want to know if they had a good experience with your service reps. Keep it relevant. 
  • Make the questions thoughtful: Yes or no questions are great for collecting quick information. However, if you want more valuable feedback, leave your queries open-ended, and give customers room to explain themselves. 
  • Use rating scales: If your customer doesn’t have time to respond to a question in your survey with a complete answer, a rating scale can give you some helpful insights with minimal effort from the client. 

Ensure none of the questions on your survey are leading or loaded. Customers don’t want to feel like you’re answering questions for them. It might also be worth showing your audience how much you value their data with a quick response. Hilton Hotels always responds to any adverse reactions to surveys within days of receiving the information. 

Customers can even see how their reviews contribute to the overall rating of the business. 

2. Master Your Emails and Customer Contact Forms

Email is one of the easiest and most effective ways to gather customer feedback. Because this is a standard support channel for most businesses, there are plenty of opportunities to generate feedback. 

The first step in using emails for feedback is to send a message thanking your customer for their recent interaction with you. If someone purchased a product from your company, immediately follow up to let them know you appreciate their custom. A couple of days after, when your customer has had a chance to use your product or service, that’s when you follow up with your feedback request. 

Ideally, your email request should be as short and straightforward as possible, with a clear call to action that tells your customer what to do next. This example from Papier keeps things as detailed as possible.

If you want to boost your chances of engagement, you can add elements to your email that might encourage a positive response, for instance:

  • Remind them of what they bought: Remind your customer of the item they purchased with a picture and a bit of information. Highlight the key features and benefits of that product, so they have some inspiration on what to write about in their review. 
  • Offer them a reward: If you want to boost your chances of your customers doing something for you, you need to offer something in return. This could be a discount on their next order, a chance of winning something, or even just free shipping on their next purchase. 
  • Personalize the message: Make your customer feel special by personalizing the message. Use their name and reference their previous interactions with your company. If they’ve been with your business for a while, mention that in the email.  

Remember, many of your customers are likely to check their emails on the go. That means that giving feedback should be as simple as possible, regardless of the tech your customer is using. For instance, in this Zomato example, users can choose to drop an email to the company or send feedback straight from the app. 

3. Create App Usability Tests

If you want some in-depth insights into your company, and your business processes, then a usability test could be the best way to generate valuable feedback. If you have your app, ask your customer to submit some information right there and then, after they’ve finished using the service. The great thing about this kind of input is it’s fresh.

Unlike other customer reviews that might come a day or two after your customer has used a product, usability tests allow you to get feedback at the moment. There’s a much better chance that you’re going to get some relevant and detailed responses here. 

For instance, in this Skype lab feedback request, customers can tick boxes for any video or audio issues they had and leave a starred review. 

If there’s extra information to share, the customer can tap on the comment box to elaborate. However, they don’t need to do this part unless they want to. 

With usability tests, it’s a good idea to focus on a few key things that you want to learn about. For instance, Skype’s example above demonstrates that the company wants to check at least five user experience issues for both video and audio. 

Giving your customers options that they can choose from reduces the amount of work they need to put into leaving a review. It also means that you can get actionable information on which parts of your app or site need the most improvement. 

You can get the same kind of instant feedback on your website, too, mainly if you’re using a live chat app for customer service. 

Live chat is quickly becoming an essential part of the customer experience environment because it’s fast, easy to use, and efficient. It’s also highly affordable for most companies, thanks to evolving technology. Set up your Live Chat app to immediately request a review from your customer when the interaction is over.

For instance, SiteGround asks customers to rate their service provider with a picture of the employee they spoke to. The image lets the customer see that they were talking to a real person, which improves the relationship with the company. The statement about feedback improving the customer service and support that SiteGround can offer shows the customer how valuable their reviews are. 

4. Conduct Customer Interviews

Conducting a customer interview is a lot like sending out a survey. The main difference is that you ask the client to engage in a much more in-depth conversation. Usually, these interviews will be the initial research required for a published case study on a B2B website. 

Reaching out to valuable and loyal customers can give you a fantastic source of in-depth information to learn from. You’ll need to make sure that you have a good relationship with the customer in question before you attempt this, however. Most one-time clients won’t want to get involved with a time-consuming interview. 

Look at your CRM technology and find out who your most impressive VIP customers are. Reach out to them with a request for feedback, and make sure you offer something in return. For instance, tell them that you’d like to interview for a case study that you can display on your website. If they’re happy for you to do this, you can reward them with a discount on their next purchase or some gifts. 

You could also follow up with a customer who recently contacted your team for an interview, like Ticket Arena does here. With this message, they promise the customer that their insights will make the customer experience better for future clients:

When requesting long-form qualitative feedback, remember to think through your questions carefully. In-depth stories from customers bring nuance and color to your quantitative data. They could even guide your business to making some crucial future decisions. 

When talking to your customers:

  • Start with an open-ended dialogue: Remember that open-ended questions are crucial to get as much detail as possible from your customers. These queries give your customers more flexibility to cover the details of their experiences.
  • Get more specific as you go: Start with simple questions, then build on them as your conversation evolves. Use the things you learn from your customers to dive into topics that are relevant to them. For instance, if a customer mentions your live chat app, go into a deeper discussion about the channels they prefer to use. 
  • Practice active listening: Make sure that you’re open and receptive to the information you’re given. Actively listen to customers, even if you’re not in the same room, by acknowledging what they say and providing valuable responses. 

5. Use Social Media

Sometimes, people are reluctant to give feedback for your business on your website because they’re not in the frame of mind. When customers come to your site, there’s a good chance they’re looking for information from you or want to check out a new product. 

They’re probably not in the right mood to start sharing their opinions. 

However, if you capture your customers on social media, there’s a good chance they’ll be feeling a lot more talkative. After all, social media platforms are where most customers discuss their issues with companies, talk about purchases with friends, and make their voices heard. 

Simply paying attention to when people talk about your company on social media can give you a lot of helpful feedback. Social listening tools allow you to collect post information every time someone mentions your business name or product. 

Alternatively, you can actively use the tools on social media to gather data from customers. For instance, Instagram has its own “poll” feature on Stories that allows companies to collect opinions. 

If you’re collecting feedback on social media, remember that you shouldn’t be asking any questions that are too complicated. Although people are more willing to share their opinions on social, they’re still looking for a relatively laid-back and casual experience.

Polls, where people can vote for their preferences with a single click, are more likely to garner engagement than a post asking people to tell you about the best purchasing experience they ever had with your brand. 

If you do want to encourage more in-depth feedback, the best option is to promise a reward in return for your follower’s effort. 

Make the experience fun by transforming it into a competition. 

For instance, ask your customers to share their favorite story involving your brand for a chance to win an impressive prize. You can ask each customer to tag their response with a branded hashtag so that relevant answers are easier to find. You could even add users to tag their friends in their posts too, to increase brand reach while you collect feedback:

With gifts and rewards to incentivize them, people will be much more likely to interact with your brand and put effort into the reviews they leave. You could even gather some user-generated content to put into your subsequent ad campaigns. 

6. Create a Dedicated Website Page

Finally, if you want to make it as simple as possible for people to leave feedback on your website and for you to collect all of that information into one space, then create a review page on your website. This can double up as social proof for people who need additional evidence to buy from your brand. 

A review page could be as simple as a page on your website listing the latest comments that your customers have left. You can include a form at the bottom of the page where people can add their thoughts. Just make sure that you carefully review these posts before they’re submitted to your website if you want to prevent spam from getting through. 

You could also create a case study or portfolio page that showcases the work you’ve done with other companies like Fabrik Brands does here:

At the bottom of each case study, give your customers a unique email address they can reach out to if they want to be featured as your following case study. Or include a contact form where people can get in touch to discuss their own experiences. 

Having a dedicated review, case study, or testimonial page on your website could be enough to inspire more feedback from your customers. It’s also a fantastic way to demonstrate how credible your company is to potential buyers. 

Still, Struggling? Take the Customer Out of the Equation

If, even with all the suggestions above, you still can’t seem to convince your audience to give you some decent feedback, then take them out of the equation. You can learn things about your audience without asking them for information. Google Analytics and other tools will give you valuable insights into which of your blog pages get the most engagement and how many people click on individual buttons throughout your site. 

These fundamental insights might not be as good as valuable, contextual feedback from your audience, but they’re an excellent way to start figuring out how to invest in your future growth. 

Remember, feedback of any kind – even if it’s just statistics and numbers – gives your business the ability to grow and make informed decisions.

Gather as much feedback as you can, and make sure you use it!

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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Java Creator James Gosling Interview

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Introduction

James Gosling, often referred to as « Dr. Java », is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language. He did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. Our DevRel, Grigory Petrov, had the opportunity to interview James, and we have included the entire transcript below. Hope you enjoy it!

The Interview

Grigory: As software developers and software consultants, we’re trying to organize a community in Russia: Python, Ruby, Java, and Go communities. And we want to help our fellow developers by conducting interviews that highlight essential questions for our industry. I think that your experience and your work on Java can help developers to become better. So let’s try to help them!

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