A renewed focus on the user in 2008
Saturday, 9. February 2008, 00:04:51
For those of you who are truly obsessed with all things Opera (and routinely browse through Opera employee blogs), you might have noticed that my title recently changed from Community Marketing & Research Manager to Product Research Manager. If you're curious about what that means, read on...
When I first joined Opera in 2006, I was tasked to help the company learn more about Opera users so we could better reach out to them via our marketing initiatives. As we all know, Opera is a complex piece of software that is many different things to different people, so we need real data and careful planning to determine the best way to let people know about our products.
After a little while, my research activities tapered off a bit, and I became more involved in the day-to-day marketing aspects of Opera, especially in terms of working with our very awesome user community. This year, however, I'm diving head first back into research, but with a slightly different fcous.
Instead of just informing our marketing strategy, my work to understand Opera users (and potential users) will be geared towards helping our product managers make decisions about the future of the browser itself. So although I won't be working quite as much with the community on outreach projects (such as what you'd see on Choose Opera), I'll be stepping up my interaction with Opera users to learn more about why people use (or don't use) Opera, and what we need to do to make our product better for end-users.
Of course, we've always had employees reading and/or participating on the My Opera forums, blogs, and studying various user wishlists and feedback forms, and they'll continue to do so. My job is to build on that work, creating new and better processes by which user needs/feedback are incorporated into our decision making. In a way, my work with end-users runs parallel to the very crucial work done by my colleagues (such as David Storey and Chris Mills) who work with the Web developer community.
All that said, I really enjoyed planning and working on projects last year to encourage our community members to go out and tell people about Opera. We'll be hiring a new community manager, and I look forward to working with him or her to keep up the momentum we built in 2007 so we can do even better in 2008!
When I first joined Opera in 2006, I was tasked to help the company learn more about Opera users so we could better reach out to them via our marketing initiatives. As we all know, Opera is a complex piece of software that is many different things to different people, so we need real data and careful planning to determine the best way to let people know about our products.
After a little while, my research activities tapered off a bit, and I became more involved in the day-to-day marketing aspects of Opera, especially in terms of working with our very awesome user community. This year, however, I'm diving head first back into research, but with a slightly different fcous.
Instead of just informing our marketing strategy, my work to understand Opera users (and potential users) will be geared towards helping our product managers make decisions about the future of the browser itself. So although I won't be working quite as much with the community on outreach projects (such as what you'd see on Choose Opera), I'll be stepping up my interaction with Opera users to learn more about why people use (or don't use) Opera, and what we need to do to make our product better for end-users.
Of course, we've always had employees reading and/or participating on the My Opera forums, blogs, and studying various user wishlists and feedback forms, and they'll continue to do so. My job is to build on that work, creating new and better processes by which user needs/feedback are incorporated into our decision making. In a way, my work with end-users runs parallel to the very crucial work done by my colleagues (such as David Storey and Chris Mills) who work with the Web developer community.
All that said, I really enjoyed planning and working on projects last year to encourage our community members to go out and tell people about Opera. We'll be hiring a new community manager, and I look forward to working with him or her to keep up the momentum we built in 2007 so we can do even better in 2008!
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(29%)
By The Eye of Horus, # 9. February 2008, 00:37:58
By BAMAToNE, # 9. February 2008, 03:31:19
By Lawmune, # 9. February 2008, 03:51:59
How's the research going on users with exotic languages/cultures, like Romanian?
By dantesoft, # 9. February 2008, 08:06:14
By IceArdor, # 9. February 2008, 08:59:34
By RachidNL, # 9. February 2008, 11:07:20
(Growing Opera's marketshare is good, and we all know that more people using Opera means an improved Opera experience for everyone, but that growth has to be done right.)
In addition to looking at why people around the world choose Opera, learning how they use Opera gives us insight on specific areas we need to improve on.
All of this is made trickier by the fact that Opera use is quite varied across different countries and regions, so the scope of our inquiry has to be international.
dantesoft: I would never forget Romania! My grad school colleague from Romania is the person who first introduced me to the Opera browser about 6 years ago. These days, he's the CEO of ISIS M3.
By Lawmune, # 9. February 2008, 17:14:50
By philry4n, # 10. February 2008, 16:11:43
Will you be at SxSW again this year? Maybe we could meet up and discuss some ideas?
By Eddie_Lopez, # 11. February 2008, 16:34:50
I'm sure I'll be working more closely with our usability guys.
Will you be at SXSW? If so, we should definitely meet up! Send me a quick e-mail (lawrence.eng at opera.com), and we'll arrange something.
By Lawmune, # 11. February 2008, 19:44:59