Good ideas don’t always make good products - especially on the first try.
More than a great design, thorough market research, and testing, there’s one easy way to find out if your product will survive the market:
Can this idea/product become something more?
If the answer is YES! Congratulations, you have a fighting chance. But before you start adding anything new to your product, there are five important questions that will guide you in making sure you grow in the right direction.
We took all of this into account all of the above when working on MightyForms - and presently we are undergoing a transition ourselves. We discovered a lot about our market, our form builder and, more importantly, what wasn’t working with MightyForms 1.0. So, here are the five most important questions we learned to ask ourselves and as they can be applied to any industry.
1. What should not be changed?
Take advantage of the fact that you’re not starting from scratch. Something about your MVP or 1.0 drew in a crowd of people (however the size) and they liked it.
Find out what drew people in and make sure you keep it.
There are a couple of ways that you can find out what’s hindering your growth: You can keep track of analytics to see which features get used the most, and which don’t. Or, you can simply ask directly with a survey to your current users.
Or both. We made sure to keep track of which features had the most queries, we sent out surveys and kept a close eye on our analytics reports to see what people flocked towards the most.
What we’ve kept in MightyForms is the users’ freedom of action. We kept the possibility to fully customize forms: they still blend seamlessly to a brand’s website and automate tasks with custom settings that free up their time.
2. What should be changed?
Initially, we only strove to create a form building tool that would be simple and versatile at the same time. But as soon as the solid foundation is laid and the sturdy wireframe is erected, you have to start to think through what can be done to improve it.
We had the added benefit of our enthusiasm being constantly warmed up and reinforced by numerous positive feedback we receive from our customers. We were now working on a multi-purpose, convenient, nimble form-building application that is equipped with a comfy user-friendly interface and plenty of customizable options.
What keeps the current users interested and drives more people to your product
And that is how we got carried away with improvements. We separated the Form Builder from the Form Designer to make building forms smoother. We added plenty of new fields (like Rating, Google Maps, and Price) and improved MightyForms’ toolbox with a wider range of design options - e.g. setting an image as a background, button styling, and much more.
We completely revamped the mechanics of the builder itself, clearing out the code in order to fasten its performance. At some point, after so many transformations had been done, the question of global update felt crucial.
3. How will this change affect current and future clients?
This requires a very deep understanding of how your product works and how your users interact with it. Current users may have gotten used to stepping around the bugs, for example, so how can you guide them through the new User Interface? Which steps do they have difficulty with right now? How will your clients recognize the solutions you provide them?
You also need to keep in mind your new users by trying to always see your product with fresh eyes.
What can seem like an intuitive step, can leave new users completely lost.
Our changes were all based on user feedback. From the way the published forms loaded to the colors in the builder’s elements, we made sure that each change reflected a real need that we got from our userbase. We also knew that we had to reward these early adopters for their contribution in making our form builder so much better. Which is why every user that signed up before our launch got 30 days free of all our premium features.
And while our form builder is available completely free, our future clients are also rewarded with a major discount on our premium plans.
4. What can go wrong with this update?
The more you change, the more can go wrong. Which is why it’s better to overprepare.
When working out the update, we did our best to assure the application with maximum quickness and reliability. It is, however, impossible to foresee everything - so our technicians have already got armed with the keyboards, ready to get ahead and hunt the bugs down before they act up in front of users.
Be prepared for every worst-case scenario.
At the same time, we at MightyForms are aware that a completely new UI and UX can easily make our current users feel lost. So we tried to predict every single question our customers could have, and added them all into our Help Center. We prepared detailed product tours and notified everyone with an omnichannel marketing campaign.
5. When is the next update?
Looking for perfection will get you stuck. The list of things to change, add or improve is neverending (as it should be), but that means your improved product will never see the light of day, simply because it’s impossible to check all tasks in that list.
The best cure for that is to know what needs to be prioritized and what can wait for the next super update. You will want to focus first and always on what matters more to your users and target audience.
A product will never be 100% perfect. Let your users guide you to what needs to be fixed next.
This decision is never easy, especially when you know your product can be better. We’ve had ‘More Native Integrations’ written on our roadmap for a while now, and for MightyForms 2.0, it’s still there. While integrations are vital for our users, who want to automate as many tasks as possible and not lose any data, we knew that the builder itself needed more work and was the top priority if we wanted to keep the users we already had.
There you have it. Five easy questions that take plenty of data analytics to make sure that you’re answering them correctly and guiding you in the right direction. Find out more about MightyForms and the solutions we’re bringing to businesses with powerful online forms.
