What is Web Product?

Prajwal Shrestha
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Is Website a Web Product?

I’m always curious about UI/UX design & its trends. I have worked with some dynamic & e-commerce frameworks since the last 6 years. Happily, I got an opportunity to dive into web product in IntroCept. I’ve been working since last February 2016; really wonderful. I’m really happy to learn new things daily with awesome team. IntroCept provides people a platform like Learn, Develop and Grow.

When we design a product, we have to consider about its factors and attributes like frequency of use, data architecture, client’s participation & interaction, user-friendly, eco-system product, etc. Let me quickly explain between a website and product designs. Is website a Product? Absolutely not! When we are building a product, we are sincerely concerned about its attributes and its scope. We need to adopt a mindset to deliver an amazing design, from conception to finished product.

A Website Is Not a Product?

Let’s ask what is a Web product? What makes a product, a product?

Some Attributes of a web Product:

  1. Frequency of Use
  2. Direction of Data and Content
  3. Navigation and Participation
  4. Pages or Flows
  5. Presence of Accounts
  6. Beyond the Browser

Let’s imagine a fantastic bakery cafe called a Nanglo. It’s known for its fabulous bakery items, good delivery services around the town. It has a website and customers visit their website from time to time to get phone numbers to order bakery items and find out about the daily special items. The website of Nanglo works like a brochure but a website is not really a product. It’s mostly static content and customer interaction is usually limited to browsing the content rather than signing up for email newsletters, which does not offer the customer in the way of visitor input, content contribution or interactive participation. It’s pretty easy to recognize three things about Nanglo’s website:

  1. It’s a good fit for Bakery’s business needs.
  2. Featuring Product items on a daily basis.
  3. It’s a brochure, not a product.

So, Nanglo’s website is not a product but it might be used like a product. Imagine Hari Bahadur is the owner of Nanglo’s. Each morning he arrives at his shop and releases some special discount price on specific items by publishing his blog post. He sits down in the office, start the laptop and open the admin dashboard of a website. He can see all of the pages on the Nanglo’s site- Home, Menu, Today’s Special, History, Blog, and Feedback.

In the blog section, he clicks the “New Post” button and starts a new entry to list the special: five-for-two free Donuts featuring in the six varieties, available today only. Before saving, he chooses the “Daily Special” category for his post. When he clicks Save, the post appears on Nanglo’s site. The system also automatically posts an update to social sites from where people are notified the today’s special item news.

Just as we thought behind the scenes, Nanglo’s brochures website uses a product. As the owner of Nanglo’s, he has been using a Web Product every day to manage how he presents his business online, how he communicates specials and how he builds his business reputations and relationship with customers.

The management, promotion, and communication of his business are facilitated by something much more than a website. The web product we use may look like a website on the surface; but upon further inspection, we’ll find that its features, functionality, intent and design are very different. We might be using the same web-browsing devices like PCs, tablets and smart devices to access a website and a web product but there are profound and powerful differences that should influence how we design.

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