Every successful product has them… does yours? Below we boil down the practice of product design into its 3 essential components.
Useful, functional, and enjoyable.
1. Is it Useful?
If we had to choose one of these three traits to be the most important, it would be this one.
First and foremost, a product must be useful. If a product isn’t useful, everything else is irrelevant because nobody will need it.
[caption id="attachment_127537" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
Obviously, usability and enjoyability are important as well… just not as important. In fact, a University of Michigan study not only confirmed this, it also put a number to it. Usefulness is 1.5 times as important as usability.
So now that we know what the most important trait in UX is, let’s talk about how to achieve it.
The Please-Pain Principle
It’s a common psychology theory that many living creatures act only for two reasons:
- Receive pleasure
- Avoid pain
Right away, a useful product with either make the user feel good, or solve some kind of problem in their life.
Jon Burgstone and Bill Murphy, Jr., take this a step further in an article for Fast Company. They suggest a product that lets the user "avoid pain" if far more useful.
Good products make the user’s life easier. The most successful products throughout history have offered either a helpful service that no one else provided, or a helpful feature that their competitors lacked. Solving a problem demonstrates more value to a user than merely being fun to use (although both are important, as we’ll explain later).
[caption id="attachment_127538" align="aligncenter" width="628"]
How do you figure out what problems your users have? The answer is simple — customer development. Interviews, surveys, diary studies, analytics, A/B testing, etc., reveal pressing users problems are with your product, outside of your product, and what their preferences are for solving them.
Once you have a solid idea of how you can help users avoid pain, you can always validate your assumptions with an MVP.
Minimum Viable Products
Before launching the complete product, test the waters with an MVP (minimum viable product). This is the most barebones version of your product (minimum) that still shows its value (viable). Releasing an MVP before the completed product gets you some crucial feedback that you can implement before the final launch, and indicates if your product idea is actually useful.
MVPs can come in different forms and shapes, but here are three of the best:
-
Start a fundraising campaign — In our free ebook UX Design for Startups, we explain how fundraising doubles as a test for how valuable your product is, plus keeps you in direct contact with supporters from the start.
-
Create a landing page – A lone landing page with an email form can establish an early base before the site launch. Run some advertisements (Adwords) to generate interest, then check how the statistics on traffic or emails.
-
"Wizard of Oz" product – Fake it ‘til you make it. The shoe retailer Zappos started with co-founder Nick Swinmurn actually going to stores and buying the shoes that users selected, then shipping them out. It required dedication and hard work, but it was a cheap and low-tech method to test his idea.
[caption id="attachment_127539" align="aligncenter" width="800"]
A good mix was Buffer, which started as a landing page that mimicked a home page, centering around a call-to-action to use the product. The CTA was fake, and took users to an apologetic page explaining that they were still putting the "finishing touches" on it. However, they collected emails from “earlyvangelists” and determined that enough people were willing to use it.
Therefore, they verified that their product idea was indeed useful.
2. Is it Functional?
Once you have a useful product idea, you better make sure that it works. "Functional" describes how well a product performs its purpose. To use another word, usability.
[caption id="attachment_127540" align="alignright" width="453"]
According to the UX experts at the Nielsen Norman Group, there are five factors of usability:
-
Efficiency — How easily users can accomplish tasks.
-
Errors — How many mistakes are made by either the user or the interface.
-
Learnability — How quickly the user learns how to use it.
-
Memorability — How well the user remembers how to use it after an absence.
-
Satisfaction — How much the user enjoys using it.
Because these requirements are pretty technical, they can be handled in technical ways. We find the following 3-step method most effective and repeatable.
Continue reading %The 3 ‘Non-Negotiables’ of Successful Product Design%
by Jerry Cao via SitePoint
No comments:
Post a Comment