Recruiting End Users For Enterprise Software Applications

As I work with a few enterprise software start-ups I often get asked about how to find early customers to validate and refine early design prototypes. The answer is surprisingly not that complicated. The following is my response to a recent question on Quora, "How do we get a target audience for enterprise applications, when you dont have an enterprise customer yet for rapid prototyping?"

Finding a customer and finding end users are quite different. In enterprise software end users are not the buyers and the buyer (customer) may or may not use your software at all. To recruit end users, there are three options:

Friends and families: Use your personal connections through email and social media channels and ask for their time (no more than 30 minutes) to conduct contextual inquiries and get validation on your prototypes. Most people won't say no. Do thank them by giving them a small gift or a gift card.

Find paid end users: This does seem odd but it works. I know of a few start-ups that have used this method effectively. Use Craigslist and other means to recruit people that match your end user role and pay them to participate in feedback sessions. It is worth it.

Guerrilla style: Go to a convention or a conference where you could find enough end users that fit your profile. Camp out at the convention with swag and run guerrilla style recruiting to validate and prototype. Iterate quickly, preferably in front of them, and validate again.

Objectively Inconsistent

During his recent visit to the office of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos said, "to be consistently objective, one has to be objectively inconsistent." I find this perspective very refreshing that is applicable to all things and all disciplines in life beyond just product design. As a product designer you need to have a series of point of views (POV) that would be inconsistent when seen together but each POV at any given time will be consistently objective. This is what design thinking, especially prototyping is all about. It shifts a subjective conversation between people to an objective conversation about a design artifact.

As I have blogged before I see data scientists as design thinkers. Most data scientists that I know of have knowledge-curse. I would like them to be  consistently objective by going through the journey of analyzing data without any pre-conceived bias. The knowledge-curse makes people commit more mistakes. It also makes them defend their POV instead of looking for new information and have courage to challenge and change it. I am a big fan of work of Daniel Kahneman. I would argue that prototyping helps deal with what Kahneman describers as "cognitive sophistication."

The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence.

This very cognitive sophistication works against people who cannot self-analyze themselves and be critical to their own POV. Prototyping brings in objectivity and external validation to eliminate this unconscious-driven irrationality. It's fascinating what happens when you put prototypes in the hands of users. They interact with it in unanticipated ways. These discoveries are not feasible if you hold on to single POV and defend it.

Let it go. Let the prototype speak your design—your product POV—and not your unconscious.

Photo courtesy: New Yorker