Your product shouldn’t tell me about your product organization

I play fantasy football on ESPN. Here’s what the Scoreboard view looks like:

Fine, just fine. But what’s “FantasyCast”?

I’m not sure but the button is big and red so I tap it.

Here’s what I see:

Almost the same exact thing, but a little nicer.

Now I see which games are in progress.

I get little color indicators showing me whether the team is on defense or in the red zone.

I get live updates.

So, why isn’t FantasyCast the default Scoreboard view?

The only possible answer is that ESPN must have a FantasyCast team.

I don’t mean to pick on ESPN here — this kind of thing is pretty common at larger organizations.

To avoid creating a clunky product experience, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Humans only want to remember one name: the name of your product

FantasyCast is a dope feature, but ultimately it’s just a better Scoreboard. Scoreboard is a word that has meaning to people. FantasyCast isn’t, and even worse it’s in CamelCase.

Don’t build Frankenstein

Be sensitive to any jarring navigational leaps in your product. Note that when I tap FantasyCast, I get an entirely new set of elements in the nav bar and an altered design. Your product teams need to work together to create a seamless transition between features.

Don’t let KPIs get in the way of user experience

Presumably, the FantasyCast team is charged with some product metrics that span across all sports. Accordingly they build a series of standalone pages and track engagement on those pages. They ping the Fantasy product managers and ask them to link to those newly instrumented pages.

This is bad for the reasons discussed above — the user is jumping to an unfamiliar, questionably named, different-looking page.

But even worse, FantasyCast is sure to underperform by requiring an extra tap on the user’s part. By replacing the Scoreboard and integrating with its parent product, FantasyCast would actually see more engagement. The challenge is adequately tracking your product’s performance inside someone else’s.

In short:

Bad products are fractured along the fault lines of the organization.

Good products are cohesive. Teams are made invisible by good communication, aligned goals, and consistent design.