Signs Your Product May Not Be Great

Are you wondering why your products are not scaling? These three reasons might be why

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A quality product is one that delivers on its promises and more, during an extended period. A study by FirstInsight clearly shows that the quality of a product is becoming more important than its price when people make a purchasing decision, as 53% picked quality over price (38%). Therefore, ensuring a product meets the desired quality of prospective users is paramount to the soul of any business.

No business sets out to create a low-quality product. However, factors such as inadequate or improper market research, poor quality-management culture, lack of regular upgrades, and inability to meet customer needs can all lead to a low-quality product.

The impact of a sub-standard product is enormous. These include:

• Reduced ROI
• Reduced market share
• Poor recommendations
• Increased customer complaints
• The entire loss of business

Here are three signs you are running a sub-standard product:

1. Poor product design

“Never compromise on the design quality of your product” should be in every product manual that ever existed and ever will exist. Yes, it is that important. To corroborate this point, Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, shared in this article how they saved the business from ruin by re-thinking and re-investing in their product design. They doubled their weekly income by improving the quality of the pictures on the Airbnb website. Incredible, right?

When you get your design right, you reduce present and future development costs, get customers to use your product more, solidify customer loyalty, and ultimately, your product stays competitive.

Product design encompasses more than just the aesthetics of the product. It involves the entire process of recognizing a market opportunity, defining the problem of that market clearly, developing a solution to that market and authenticating that solution with users.

Here are three quick ways to check your product design quality:

1. Simplicity

The simpler it is to use your product, the more likely it is going to succeed. Just take a look at the Google search engine. Any two-year-old can probably use it effectively. Make your product simpler by:

• Designing for the sole purpose of your product. Be as clear as possible.
• Reducing product/feature execution steps. The faster users can execute actions, the more they will interact with your product.
• Limiting options for choices. The book The Paradox of Choice, which explains how too many options can reduce happiness in humans, illustrates this point.

2. Empathy

A quality product must fully feel the pain of its users to solve their problems effectively. It is only when a product is empathetic that customers begin to develop a powerful connection with it. An empathetic product is compassionately specific. That is, it solves a very particular problem while resonating deeply with the intended user. Here are a few tips to make your product more empathetic:

• Get massive customer input. You should continuously listen to your customers and iterate accordingly.
• Create user personas. User personas will help you understand the key traits, behavior and specific needs of a particular type of user.
• Get your market fit right. The more specific your users are, the easier it is to understand them. Remember, you cannot please everyone.

3. User experience

The look, feel and usability of a product make up its user experience. It is how a user feels when interacting with your product. According to this article on Forbes, investing in UX design will generate an ROI of 9900%. Wow! These few tips can help improve your product’s user experience:

• Respond to public feedback. Users are always pouring out their hearts about your product on app review platforms, social media and internet forums. Never ignore them.
• Remove redundancy. Customers should only have to perform tasks with/on your product once.
• Watch customers interact with your product. You can get firsthand information about whether they are interacting with your product correctly.

2. Fails to meet expectations

In the mind of prospective users are endless possibilities of what your product can do for them. Before purchasing your product, they have a belief that it will provide satisfaction or solve a particular problem. A product that fails to meet expectations is one that does not meet customer satisfaction from a customer’s perspective. If users are not satisfied with a product, that product is said to be a low-quality product.

Determining customer expectations can be an arduous task, as expectations are always changing, and customer demands are insatiable. It is also imperative to understand that your expectations for your products are not necessarily your customers’. A lot of factors shape user expectations. These include your communication to prospective customers about what your product will accomplish, experience from using similar products and other customer reviews.

Try these few things to meet customer expectations:

• Communicate clearly and effectively. Never promise what you can’t deliver. Let potential customers know what they are getting, exactly, when they buy your product. Leave no room for ambiguity.
• Build a relationship as fast as possible with customers to not only meet expectations but to exceed them. Be customer-centric.
• Be consistent in all aspects of your product delivery, from responding quickly to user complaints, to sending a “Thank you for using our product” note. Customers love consistency.

3. It doesn’t last

Durability is one of the hallmarks of quality. When you build durable products, you also grow a reputation. If your strategy is to produce products that don’t last, so customers will keep coming back, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. You not only lose customer retention, but you also lose profit per customer.

Durability is not limited to physical products. Software products can be durable, too. According to Wikipedia, software durability depends on four factors: software trustworthiness, human trust for serviceability, software dependability and software usability.

Enhance your product durability by:

• Identifying innovative attributes that enhance product service life
• Identifying areas of your product that might pose threats to durability
• Developing a service-oriented mindset

Improving quality should always be the goal of any organization. This is evident in the positive correlation between the success of a business and the quality of its products. When you produce quality products, you create happy customers.