Constraints for product design

Learn to self-impose them

I have a serious obsession with constraint design.

The idea is to design a set of constraints that are self-imposed that protect you from messing up fundamentals.

These contraints are a result of my experience at Freshout, Breezi, Recordit, Placeit.

This is only one set (of possibly endless) of combinations that could work. I’m just sharing with you the one that I’ve seen work multiple times.

warning: they may seem too simple but they are very hard to acheive.

The constraints

• Frictionless to first wow reaction for the user (fast + free)
• User input requires very low (hopefully none) pre-processing before it can be put in the app (Medium would fail this constraint for ex)
• 99% should happen behind the scenes (Google search would qualify for this constraint vs Facebook would not as much)
• No asthetic design should be allowed (to me, asthetic polish has very low upside and huge potential downside at the early parts of designing a product)

What these constraints are likely to create

• User has a very high likelihood to finishing your “wow” flow
• Very little steps to get the user input(or give you permission to transfer)
• Something that can easily be tried
• Something that has a chance to be defendable
• Something that has many use cases beyond what you could ever define
• Something that some press/blogs could write about
• Something that users would share without requiring a “viral loop”
• Something that could be monetized to some degree at some point
• Reduced complicated UX flows that could be misunderstood
• No crazy asthetic conventions that can confuse a user