Product Design is About a Mission, a Vision and an Architecture
Think About Four Layers of Design
Category: User Centered Design
Frictionless Design Choices
Low-Friction Design Patterns
Assuming you’re adding features to a product, the following are six design patterns to follow, each essentially reducing friction in your product. They cause the need to learn, consider, futz, or otherwise not race through the product to get something done.
- Decide on a default rather than options
- Create one path to a feature or task
- Offer personalization rather than customization
- Stick with changes you make
- Build features, not futzers
- Guess correctly all the time
Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything
First, rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses—basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas. Essentially, this is a diagram of how a company creates value for itself and its customers. (See the exhibit “Sketch Out Your Hypotheses.”)
Second, lean start-ups use a “get out of the building” approach called customer development to test their hypotheses. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed: New ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, they start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working. (See the exhibit “Listen to Customers.”)
Third, lean start-ups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which start-ups create the minimum viable products they test. (See the exhibit “Quick, Responsive Development.”)
Here’s Why You’ll Hate the Apple Watch (and the Important Business Lesson You Need to Know)
Here’s the Gist:
- Dr. Noriaki Kano developed a revealing model for understanding how various product features affect customer happiness.
- A “delightful” feature is an attribute of the product customers love but do not expect — for example, new apps in the app store.
- A “linear” feature is one the user expects and more of that quality increases satisfaction — think more battery life.
- A “hygienic” feature is a must-have. Customers not only expect these attributes, they depend on them — for example, reliably telling the time on a watch.
- To save battery life, Apple designed the Apple Watch to only display the time when it thinks you’re looking at it. This violates a hygienic feature and will annoy users.
- However, like the first versions of the iPhone, users will forgive the watch’s flaws if the delightful features (namely the apps in the App store) knock their socks off.
- Products can win markets by ensuring their “delighter” features compensate for flaws.
User Testing How-To Links
Links for guides on usability testing – for HCD documentation
- Steve Krug YouTube video
- Summary of above Steve Krug YouTube video
- Usability.gov “Running a Usability Test“
- Usability.gov “Usability Testing“
- Nielsen Norman Group “Usability Testing“
- How to do user testing for a website or a mobile app
- Web site usability testing: recommended procedures
- 9 Steps for Creating the Perfect User Test
Fullstory – website user testing
See what your users see.
FullStory lets your company easily record, replay, search, and analyze each user’s actual experience with your website. Think of it as your team’s super-searchable DVR for all customer interactions.
NO DICKHEADS! A Guide To Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams
There’s one very simple rule when innovating: design the process to fit the project.
In the world of consulting, customizing the design process is easy because every project is different. But in big corporations every project can be more or less the same — you are essentially designing another product very similar to the last one. Design within big corporations needs, therefore, to behave a little like it is consulting.
Regardless of where you work, the challenge becomes how to modify the design process. That process begins by designing a metaphoric window, frame, or filter for people to see the world the way you see it: which requires designing itself.
If people can understand your vision of the project through this lens, then empower them to be experts of it — allowing them to apply this view to various parts of a project. If you can do this, a project has enormous potential.
…My definition of a dickhead is a person whose ambition for themselves or their own career is greater than their ambition for the project or team.
If you have a Dickhead in the studio then the entire environment, the productivity, the creativity, and the product decisions themselves skew away from the product or team goals. As a result, the product is a vehicle for their ego, and it should be the inverse.
The Power of Minimalism: A Story of Redesigning Yelp
Excellent article – highly recommended.
Design by committee is death by a thousand cuts.
It kills slowly, as more and more people weigh in with their opinions, until the “revised” design looks like a stew of lesser parts. It certainly doesn’t need to be that way, especially for large companies like Yelp.
We chose to redesign their site to show how usability testing done properly can unleash the power of just one. Based on our experience as designers at different companies, we found usability testing to be the best defense for design decisions.
When in doubt, let the user stand between you and overbearing stakeholders and the evidence will speak for itself.
UX Recipe
Good list of techniques and methods with descriptions. Not too useful for its intended purpose but the collection is a could be useful as a reference.
