{"id":1482,"date":"2014-01-27t23:13:29","date_gmt":"2014-01-27t23:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2014-01-27t23:13:29","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27t23:13:29","slug":"product-development-ideation-to-creation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/blog\/product-development-ideation-to-creation\/","title":{"rendered":"product development: ideation to creation"},"content":{"rendered":"

as magooshers, all of us are constantly working to figure out how we can make our customers\u2019 test prep experience better every day, whether through new mobile apps, web features, or anything else that might enhance their studying. \u00a0this means on any given day, we on the product development team have a lot of things on our plate, from big projects to bug fixes to incremental feature enhancements; some of these ideas are user-requested, while others are come from our team here at magoosh. \u00a0regardless of where the idea comes from, we\u2019re guided by our mission<\/a> to make test prep more accessible, fun, and convenient. i\u2019d like to walk you now through our process of product development: how we decide what to build, how it gets built, and how we launch it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

get ideas from everyone and then prioritize<\/h2>\n

at magoosh, we\u2019re all in contact with our students. we\u2019re either talking to them over the phone, meeting them for coffee, or answering their questions over email. through all of these activities, we get a sense of what products would better help our customers. each monday, we meet to talk about different ideas and prioritize them based on what we think would have the most impact for our students.<\/p>\n

during these meetings, we discuss a variety of ideas, big and small. we then prioritize these ideas based on project complexity, impact on our customers, and other initiatives we have going. everyone in the company is welcome to come to the meeting and provide input. we each do different things and see different parts of the product, so it\u2019s incredibly helpful to have a variety of voices in the room informing our decision throughout the development process.<\/p>\n

one of the ideas we discussed was a flashcard app for smartphones. more than other standardized exams, the gre tests for quite an advanced level of vocabulary. we previously wrote a blog post<\/a> and an ebook<\/a> with 350 common and challenging gre words. from this list we put together, we noticed that students would either create their own physical flashcards or upload our content to other digital flashcard products, like quizlet. to make it easier for students to learn vocabulary, we decided to create our own flashcard product that had common, basic, and challenging gre words built-in.<\/p>\n

after we decide what to build, we\u2019ll start to pull together a basic prototype that illustrates the main pages and user experience for the application. for our flashcard app, this is what it looked like using balsamiq.<\/p>\n

\"product-development<\/a>\"product-development<\/a><\/p>\n

use what you’ve got\u2013leverage your team and customers<\/h2>\n

each of us has our own perspective, which is helpful. but over time, we\u2019ve learned we are not our customers<\/strong>; what makes sense to us might not make any sense to our students. instead of testing at the end of our product development process, we test early and often. we use both our internal team as well as some of our customers to test any new products we develop. for a project that\u2019s still in early stages, we\u2019ll rely on our internal team to test the user experience. we\u2019ll listen for general themes during these quick user-tests and change the prototype based on what we\u2019re hearing in between user-testing sessions.<\/p>\n

when we feel more comfortable with what we have, we\u2019ll open it up to our loyal customers; some of our customers have joined our beta program, meaning they\u2019re open to using new products that might still have some bugs\/issues. we do this to get even more feedback from customers. we\u2019ll send them a quick email with a link to the web version of our product.<\/p>\n

along with this, we\u2019ll ask them to fill out a super simple google form to get their feedback. we\u2019ll ask them what they would rate this app on a scale of 1-5, what they liked, what they didn\u2019t like, and what they wish this product would have. similar to our initial in-house user-testing, we\u2019ll look for general themes that arise from our students and incorporate their feedback into the product.<\/p>\n

from our survey, we also get an idea of how people would rate the product in the app store \ud83d\ude42 when we start seeing consistent 5\u2019s in our survey responses, we know our product is in good shape, and we\u2019ll publish it to the app store. with our flashcard app, instead of selling the app or enabling in-app purchases, we thought we\u2019d put it in the google play and ios stores for free and use it as a way for students to learn about and get familiar with magoosh. here are screenshots of our android app.<\/p>\n

\"gre-flashcard-front\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"gre-flashcard-back\"<\/a><\/p>\n

it’s in the store\u2013now spread the word<\/h2>\n

simply publishing the app isn\u2019t enough. we want students to discover it. to get the word out about our flashcard app, for example, we sent an email to our current gre students informing them about the new product\u2019s availability in the store. since we know whether a student has an android or iphone, we can craft custom emails to these two segments with links in the email to the appropriate app stores. this removes much of the friction in searching and finding the app in the store.<\/p>\n

as a student uses the app, we track statistics such as the number of cards he or she goes through. when the student has gone through approximately 100 words, we send them another message asking them to rate the app in the store. again we provide a link to the app store in this email so it\u2019s super easy for them to write the review and rate the app. we wait until they\u2019ve gone through a lot of cards because we think this is a good indicator that they are with the product.<\/p>\n

\"flashcard-email\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4.7 stars for our iphone app<\/a> with 250 reviews\u00a0and 4.6 stars for our android app<\/a> with 696 reviews; the proof is in the ratings and reviews \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

never stop seeking feedback<\/h2>\n

students sometimes also respond to these emails and request additional features. \u00a0in fact, one of the features we\u2019re working on right now enables the student to reset a deck of cards. this will change the status of the deck from mastered to new so they can go through them as if they were brand new, a feature request that came up repeatedly in the emails we received from our students. \u00a0we\u2019re listening. \ud83d\ude42 we also get ideas for new products from these emails. one of the products we\u2019re developing right now is a quiz app. stay tuned!<\/p>\n

the development process i\u2019ve just described has grown over time to be a built-in part of magoosh\u2019s culture and way of doing things, and it\u2019s been working for us. it\u2019s how we currently do things, but, at the same time, we\u2019re not married to it. as our co-founder bhavin wrote in a previous blog post<\/a>, change > status quo. we\u2019re always open to doing things differently if we think it will help our students!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

learn how we take a concept from ideation to creation at magoosh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[501],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nproduct development: ideation to creation - magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/blog\/product-development-ideation-to-creation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_us\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"product development: ideation to creation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"learn how we take a concept from ideation to creation at magoosh.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/blog\/product-development-ideation-to-creation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-01-27t23:13:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/product-development-1.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"sharat akasapu\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"sharat akasapu\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"webpage\",\"@id\":\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/blog\/product-development-ideation-to-creation\/\",\"url\":\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/blog\/product-development-ideation-to-creation\/\",\"name\":\"product development: ideation to creation - 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