On unexpected user behaviors
When you’re building a product for almost everyone, the details matter a lot. And the things different users notice or are drawn to can vary wildly.
I hosted a customer research interview call earlier this week, and the individual I spoke to was a pretty active & happy (already paying!) Buffer user. But her one pain point was that she wanted to be able to take her short-form videos and post them to all of her social channels at once, rather than having to schedule them 1 at a time.
My immediate reaction: Uh, wait, that’s like one of the main, most basic value propositions of Buffer 🤯 🧐 😶
(I kept this to myself, obviously, to be professional)
It turns out that this user’s workflow in the app was not at all what I expected for her use case. She had thought the only way to pre-schedule content was to click on the specific time slots within Buffer’s somewhat iconic “queue”.
But the queue is specific to each of your social channels. She didn’t realize that you could also start prepping a post via buttons that I’d previously thought were so obvious (and our data indicates that most users use them). Once I pointed this out to this user, she was relieved that her feature request was something we’ve had in place for a verrrryyyyy long time 😄
It had me wondering what may have led this user to her particular way of working, and whether we’ve, for years, overlooked this detail around something we thought has been obvious. Do new folks to Buffer not realize that you can schedule for multiple social networks in a single action? There are some cases where it’s more difficult to do this - are those leading folks to believe this isn’t possible? Is it not obvious enough? Is it an experiment to call this out more prominently (such as with a coach mark) worth doing?
There’s no particularly shocking learning or insight here, other than this: That I continue to be surprised by little details, which I think are obvious, not being as obvious as I may have thought.
