Users Can’t Find Product Features? Here’s How to Fix It (Fast)

Most founders I work with face the same challenge. They build great products with powerful features, but users either don't know how to use them or can't even find them. One founder told me, users had issues that were already solved, they just didn't find the features. Another one said, we built something great, but people didn't get the value. If that sounds familiar, this video is for you. I'll walk you through how we helped a startup fix exactly that, turning user confusion into activation. Hi, I'm Daniel, product designer and founder of Duran, a lean product design studio that helps tech companies fix product UX that hurts growth without the guesswork. In this video, I'll show you exactly how we helped an AI note-taker redesign their product and improve user activation and feature discoverability. We did it using our 3-step design process: first, understand the product context; second, bring ideas to life and test them with users; and third, create design assets for development. All in just 5 weeks. Let's dive in. First, we run a UX audit, walking through the product and highlighting all those friction points that might be a problem for the customers. We then summarized everything, helping the founders understand what we did, what were the key findings, what were the main takeaways, both the pros and the cons, and also highlighting the areas to improve and ideas and suggestions we have for those improvements. Then we put everything on an impact effort scale to help select those initiatives that actually deliver a change in the product and the business. Obviously, the UX audit was just the first part. During the strategy workshop, we want to understand all the important aspects of the product. That means first we have a discussion with the founders to lay down the groundwork. So we discuss about the product, the personas, or the stakeholders. Problems they want to solve, the core features, blockers, constraints, anything that's important and we should know about before launching a full redesign. We also want to understand the goals and the visions of the founders and how they measure success to make sure we are aligned around that. We also review assumptions, and this is a great place to see what are those assumptions that are important for the product and the business, but they were not tested yet. And then we can have a discussion around how we should actually test those. Then we mapped out the competitors. After that, we mapped out the user personas, focusing mostly on needs and goals, motivations, fears, frustrations, and major pain points, but also on the triggers that might occur for them in order to look into tools like this, and also the habits and anxieties they have around similar tools. We wanted to understand the journey of the users in the product, especially the pain points. And you can see here we have 2 big red dots, one around onboarding and another one around using the product. Those were the areas that we wanted to focus on during the next stage of the redesign. From this, we moved into a design sprint workshop with the team. We first focused on alignment. That means that we wanted to get on the same page regarding the challenges, regarding the users, the problems that we want to solve, and also where we see the product going in the next 2 years. Once we had an understanding about the product and the challenges and the users, we started to look into solutions, how other companies are solving similar challenges. That was the main topic. And then using the competitors, but also other softwares on the market, we started to look into how similar challenges are solved, how they help customers onboard, how they help customers better customize their experience. Inside of the product, how they help customers to understand the value of the product, and so on. As you can see here, we collected a bunch of ideas so it was clear for the whole team what are those important or interesting insights, ideas that we might want to try out. Once we had all these great ideas and inspirations in one place, we then moved into actually sketching some ideas. And you can see here we collected them as pen and paper sketches, and then we put them here on our board. This was a started the discussion about how the solution should look like. So you can see we have a couple of ideas, and from these we then defined the solution that we actually wanted to first test with customers. Now, in order to test these solutions, we defined something that's called the user test flow. It's basically the main steps that the customers will go through in order to understand that they understand the product and they could use it or not. Once we had the test flow defined, we created a prototype based on the sketches and the flow that we defined. And we had a couple of different scenarios. As you can see here on the screen, we wanted to see if they understand how in this particular case, how call details and summaries work. We just created a prototype where they could click through these actual steps and it worked something like this. While they were checking the prototype, we collected all the feedback that we got from them here on the Miro board. As you can see here, there are a bunch of notes for different areas of the product, different areas of the prototype that we tested. We summarized the insights per user and per task. So you can see here on the side, we have the green areas which were working well, yellow ones which were a bit tricky, and the red ones were the biggest pain points that we should think about, maybe redesign or improve. Then we extracted the biggest takeaways from these interviews, like how they appreciated the new design, if the prototype was working or not, what they care about, how they used the product before, and so on. Now, we didn't just stop at these big takeaways. We went through the scales to understand how people value the upgrades and also the product. And then we went area by area to highlight all the stuff that worked and what should be improved, and a couple of ideas and also quotes to give more perspective and more depth to these interviews. We also suggested some next steps that could improve the experience for the users. In the end, we packaged all these insights, all the knowledge, all the feedback, and we moved from the prototype that see first, and this is the design part of that, into the new design of the platform. We defined the design system with all the elements needed for development, from colors to typography to buttons and input fields and so on, and all the flows necessary for redesigning the product. So we worked on the sign-up and login page, the onboarding flow, the whole meetings and how people interact with meetings. And also the meeting details where they actually understand the value of the product and see what the product can do and the summaries that are generated. And so on with all the other flows and screens needed for development. So in just 5 weeks, we managed to go from the problems that they, they were having at that moment, like users asking for features that were already in the product but they couldn't find them, or the fact that they couldn't necessarily understand some of the main values that the product could deliver, to come up with solutions that we could then test with those customers to understand if what we are thinking actually will improve their experience with the product or not. And then using all those insights, all that knowledge from those interviews to then define and design the updated product experience that was then shipped into development. Thanks. Hopefully this was helpful for you, and don't forget to check out some of the other videos. Like, for example, the one about how you can use the AARRR funnel to understand better how your customers are using the product and how you can improve retention.