Fitting In Vs Standing Out: Lessons in deciding product priorities

One of the most satisfying aspect of my job as a product manager is the opportunity it presents for rethinking your work in the light of ever-changing technology landscape and evolving consumer expectations .Be it shift from skeuomorphic to Flat Design, Custom Login to FB Connect, Touch Input to Voice. There is always something or other, which present an opportunity to expand or enhance existing experience. If you (like me) love your work you will never run out of things, which can be changed or improved.

But design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We are [almost] always running a race against time. We have to ship at a deadline. Users are not very forgiving and they rarely give you a second chance. A big chunk of my time is spent on deciding what to build and what not to build. What is superficial? What is essential? And what will make us stand apart? These are difficult questions with no definitive answers. Every time we face these choices we go back to first principle, we define the objective, we debate (very heated one at that), we take gut call, we make mistakes, we learn, we improvise. Rinse repeat. This is not a very efficient way of doing things. That’s why for past few months I have been thinking a lot about the need of a framework to make this process more coherent. A framework which works as a forcing function something which tells us “How to think “ and not “What to think”

Fortunately, we recently went through this ordeal again when we have to redesign Shifu’s user interface according to Google’s material design guidelines. This time I was little more observant of our decision making pattern. This post documents my attempt at developing such framework.

Understand & Respect Compliance:

Every gambler knows, That the secret to survivin’.
Is knowin’ what to throw away, And knowin’ what to keep.
Cause every hand’s a winner, And every hand’s a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die In your sleep.
~ Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Every medium has its design guideline. Sometime they are explicit and enforced from the start (Flat design in iOS, Material in Android), Sometime they are open (web/browser) and some time they evolve gradually ( RTs ,# tag in Twitter) . Guidelines minimize the learning curve for your users. For example every Android user in world is familiar with UI elements like action bar, action overflow menu etc. Thanks to this conditioning they instinctively assume that application settings can be found at the end of action overflow menu. So where would you rather put the settings section of your app now? In this sense these guidelines are very liberating. But they can be very limiting too. As creative individuals, designers love blank canvas. These guidelines are like lines on that blank canvas. They are supposed to color within these lines. I often feel conflicted between the need to follow the guideline and urge to introduce something new of my own. How do you reconcile the need to fit in with aspiration to stand out?

I have figured out that one good way to look at this is from the lenses of compliance: Is the new thing you are trying to introduce is in conflict with the design guidelines? Or you are expanding these guidelines by adding something to it. If it is former than its best to drop the idea. Never do something that is against the guidelines of platform. This is not a judgment on merit of your idea. Often time while evaluating our ideas we tend to look at the data pertaining to our own users and assume that it’s sufficient to violate the guidelines. However these guidelines are formulated after studying user behavior across millions of user, thousands of devices and hundred of scenarios. Chances are that the people who formulated these guidelines probably know something, which you don’t. It’s best to comply.

Housekeeping issues? : Perform RCA & Delegate:

Next sets of request I get are the request for Fixes, enhancement and optimisation. I get it from clients, users, and Customer support, Investors and occasionally from my parents too. Things like optimize assets for new screen, Facebook has downgraded an API, we need to localize the interface strings for the country Where we are witnessing a surge in downloads, user are not happy with translation of help text, Error messages are not clear enough. These tasks are ghosts of yesterday which needs to be dealt with but they offer very little new learning. As a design head these are best delegated to your team. If you don’t have luxury of team (like me) then save these task for dull /bad hair days when you are not at your creative best. Nothing like a mechanical work to get through a bad day :).

There is an often-ignored aspect of these housekeeping tasks. They are treasure trove of untapped learning on how can you improve your process. Most product managers will agree that more than 50% of these issues can be detected and avoided if we are more vigilant in design stage. These are case of proverbial “downstream defect correction” and we all know that the downstream defect correction is lot more costly than nipping the damn thing in the bud.

So before you delegate the issue to someone please make sure you do a root cause analysis of why you couldn’t find this issue earlier? Where in our process I can put checks to ensure we don’t make these mistakes again. This is the single biggest long-term investment you can do toward freeing your time for more creative aspects of you work. Trust me when I say, “ It will be rewarding beyond your imagination” It was for me.

Distinct but Permeable Differentiator:

That brings us to most important aspect of design process. About giving your product a personality. You want your app to stand out you don’t want it to be indistinguishable from thousands of app in app store. You want people to identify your product with that ingenious things you imagined: The Floating button in Path, double tap to like in Instagram , Pull to refresh in Tweety2 , Swipe to dismiss in Clear, Rewind Gesture in Paper. You can see that almost every category-defining product has introduced a new and distinct interaction pattern. Some of these interaction patterns are being used by other third party developers. It’s only natural to aspire to design something like that and contribute to the ongoing design conversation. But if you think about it. None of these features can be attributed as a single point explanation for the success or failure of these products.

PATH didn’t do that well but floating button is a ubiquitous, it goes for Swipe to dismiss and Clear. On the other hand Tweet2 was a success (acquired by twitter) but the real contribution was that it made pull to refresh as a standard UI component across both iOS and Android. Paper is an amazing app, with an incredibly passionate community but for some reason rewind gesture never managed scale beyond the app. More you look at the data more you find that there is very little correlation in success of app and success of your innovation.

So how do you decide? Since developing a new interaction requires a lot of investment in terms of time and resource. So you need to make your choices very cautiously. I suggest that you try to answer following question: Does this feature /Component has a life of its own outside of app? Can I think of few more app, which can be improved by applying this feature? Would I like to make it open source? If the answer is unambiguous yes than I suggest you should invest the required time and resources.

This is my rudimentary framework for deciding product priorities. This is a work in progress. I will post the sequel to this soon. In the meantime I would love to know your comments. How do you decide priorities for your product?

Pic Credit: Hugh Macleod.