The Essential Value of Making
Crafting a next-gen product experience through rigorous analysis, evaluation, iteration, and continuous improvement.
Some years back I was hired by the CTO of a leading music technology company to design and produce a next-generation pro audio application for music professionals. Over the next two years, I worked with a small team to design and build an objectively advanced, intuitive, performant, and stable product from the ground up. Like many ambitious and under-resourced projects, ours faced certain challenges along the way that required us to take a step back and rethink our previous assumptions. In the end, the art of making and iterating quickly, fostering deep collaboration, leveraging analytics, and paying close attention to user feedback transformed our ways of working, elevated our product experience, and helped us deliver outsized impact.
Identifying Gaps in the User Journey
Shortly after launching the v1.0 app we began to notice some concerning user data. A certain percentage of users who downloaded the app were not engaging with some of our features, and other users were not completing certain task flows. We had introduced a lot of advanced functionality, but as is often the case with pro desktop apps, intuitive UX/UI alone is simply not enough.
In order to understand the problem better, I conducted a limited set of interviews with users which uncovered several key insights:
- Users were introduced to our features via our marketing channels (product page, email, social, ads, partners) and word of mouth.
- While users were excited about using our products features, they did not always understand where to begin, or what to expect.
- When users engaged with certain features, they did not always feel confident without instructions to help guide them.
It became clear that while we had built a powerful application, we had not devoted enough time to the onboarding experience, nor had we provided contextual tips or a step-by-step guide for our key features. I concluded that the most effective solution would be to create a reference guide and host it directly on our product page to aid in discoverability. I began drafting instructional copy for every feature and task flow, and quickly developed a functional prototype of the reference guide built in HTML/CSS. Even though I had only spent a few days working on it in my spare time, I was happy with the results given the short time invest, and I was fairly certain that the team would agree with the solution.
Getting Buy-in From Stakeholders
At our next weekly meeting I presented my proposed solution and asked everyone to try out the prototype and share their feedback. The team responded positively and they appreciated the initiative, including the fact that I had created a deployable solution which was saving us time and effort. Once we agreed on a plan, we had a copywriter do a pass on the text and then we launched the reference guide a few days later. We quickly noticed positive results in our support forums and in follow-up conversations with users. We had also provided our support team with the ability to direct our users to the reference guide for answers to almost every task flow question. With a comprehensive reference guide now at our users’ finger-tips, the product was given an opportunity to succeed in ways that simply were not possible before.
Lessons and Learnings
This project taught me a number of valuable lessons — including the importance of identifying gaps in the user journey and taking action. By investing in our onboarding experience and comprehensive reference guides we ensured that users would have everything they needed to fully utilize our product. Building functional prototypes and presenting new concepts helped us elevate our teams awareness and empathy, and was equally useful in helping our team make the right decisions for our users and customers.
I also learned that the product experience often reflects the values, culture, and structure of the team and organization. By leading with a strong point of view and taking the initiative, you can stimulate important discussions and learnings within your team which can lead to numerous improvements. This experience also reinforced the idea that the best products are built with rigor and continuous improvement throughout the product lifecycle. Shipping a high quality product means actively identifying issues and prioritizing them alongside the development of new features.
