If Product Design Is Not Figma, Then What Is It?
This article was written to help product designers better explain to non-designers the value of design. Junior designers or people who aspire to become a UXer should also be able to gain a deeper understanding of design through this article.
Overview
- The Challenges
- The Design Thinking framework
- Real-World Examples
- Engagement Chart on YouTube Videos
- Transaction Preview in Web3 Wallets - Say No to Dogmatism
- Product Analysis
- Microsoft Word vs Google Docs
- Google vs Bing
- The Impact/Effort Matrix - Lean Idea Testing
- Books
The Challenges
Imagine you’re given 1,000,000 USD and 1 year to create a profitable product or service? What would you do to maximize your chance of success?
Many entrepreneurs and product teams today are facing similar challenges.
Have you created a product but no one uses it? How can we make sure that the product we develop has value? In other words, we want to mitigate risks. Equally important, how can we create something that’s interesting, innovative and delightful? In other words, we want our product to have cool factors.
That’s where design thinking comes into play. It starts with and focuses on the users, the people that our product is designed for. This approach doesn’t make us immune from failure, but can provide answers or insights into some of the problems we just mentioned.
The Design Thinking framework
There are 6 stages in the framework: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. We’ll just briefly go through each stage here and won’t dive into the details. With this framework in mind, you’ll be able to better understand why certain features were developed in the first place.
Empathize
We start with the users and try to understand their attitudes, behaviors, needs, and pain points, etc… We might have a loose idea of the problem we wanted to solve, but at the same time we also want to keep an open mind and let our understanding of the users we wanted to design for inform and inspire us. Commonly used methods at this stage include user interviews, contextual inquiries, surveys etc…
Define
With data gathered from the empathize stage, we narrow down and think about the following questions:
- What’s the real problem?
- Is it the right problem to solve?
- Is it worth solving?
At this stage, we also perform competitor analysis to look at the market and see if this problem has already been solved and how much potential our product will have in terms of succeeding. More on this later with a real-world example.
Ideate
With our mind opened and the problem defined, we expand, let go and think both big and small at this stage to come up with solutions. Ideas are not censored at this point. This is where creative solutions and cool factors are likely to appear.
Prototype
With many potential solutions brainstormed in the last stage, we narrow down and hone in on a few ideas that we think will have the potential to succeed and create quick & dirty prototypes which will be used for testing.
Test
At this stage, we collide ideas with reality and test the prototypes we created. This is hugely important, because through testing, we’ll be able to assess the feasibility of our ideas from both the business point of view and the user point of view.
Implement
Hopefully after testing multiple ideas, we’ll arrive at the one that works really well. At this point, we can confidently move on to implementing and executing the idea.
The Double Diamond Design Process
The design thinking framework can also be represented using two diamond shapes, because there are two divergent phases and two convergent ones: We diverge when empathizing and ideating, and we converge when defining the problem and testing ideas.
Real-World Examples
Let’s look at some examples from some of the digital products that we’re all familiar with and see why certain features were developed through the lens of the design thinking framework.
Engagement Chart on YouTube Videos
When you mouse over the progress bar on the youtube player, the engagement chart will appear. When you move your cursor to the location with the most engagement, a label that says “most replayed” will show up. Do you know why YouTube decided to develop this feature?
Well, perhaps the UX researcher, the designer, the PM or a developer observed the pain point of users struggling to find the most helpful or useful part in a long video.
And the PM also knew that they had been tracking user engagement throughout every video because of the need to show statistics to content creators. So they thought, why not show viewers the engagement data as well to help them find the most useful part of a video?
Transaction Preview in Web3 Wallets
The next example is the transaction preview feature often seen in Web3 wallets. Do you know why product teams added this feature to their wallet apps?
Well, that was because users fell victim to scams in Web3 transactions. The front end of a dApp could be hacked and tricked users into believing that the transaction was not harmful, and users only found out that a large amount of crypto assets were transferred to the hacker after the transaction was executed. By introducing the transaction preview feature, product teams help users identify potentially malicious transactions and protect users from frauds.
Hopefully the two examples we just went through can give us a better idea of how focusing on users can help us come up with meaningful and valuable features.
Say No to Dogmatism
As you can see, there are 6 stages in the design thinking framework. However, it doesn’t mean that we have to follow these 6 stages rigidly in practice and fall into the trap of dogmatism. Frameworks are just guidelines. It’s important to stay flexible and nimble and adapt to our own circumstances.
To me, the most important things from the framework are finding the right problem to solve and testing ideas.
Product ideas can come from experience, assumption or intuition, not necessarily from lengthy, grand user research.
Additionally, user research, if not done properly, could lead to superficial results. Getting to a feasible product idea is not so much about where ideas come from, but more about testing them quickly and minimally.
Also, a user pain point doesn’t always imply product opportunities. Before getting excited about and married to an idea, be very careful about any existing solutions to the problem you’re trying to solve. If an effective solution or a similar product already exists, it could be harder for your idea to do well in the market. That’s why doing a competitor analysis is so important.
Failing to look at the market landscape and differentiate your idea from existing competitors can have huge consequences.
A good example is the new keyboard layouts that aim to increase typing speed and reduce fatigue. The Dovrak layout claims that it requires less finger motions, reduces errors, increases speed, and reduces strain injuries, while the colemak layout claims to be able to minimize finger path distances, leading to faster speed and reduced strain.
Both of these new layouts say that they offer a better typing experience than the traditional QWERTY layout, but then why haven’t they been able to replace QWERTY? That’s because users are already used to QWERTY and QWERTY is good enough for them. The benefit that users can get from these improvements is not big enough to justify the switching cost, the time and energy spent on learning and adjusting to the new layouts.
So if you were the product designer who thought about creating another keyboard layout, you probably should have examined this idea using the following questions first.
- Is there a user pain or problem here?
- Is the pain painful enough?
- Is there an existing solution?
- Is the existing solution good enough?
- Is this the right problem to solve?
By answering the questions above, you’ll be able to have a more realistic estimate of the potential of your ideas.
Product Analysis
Let’s take a look at a few other examples that include some of the products that we’re all pretty familiar with and analyze their success or failure using the list of questions that we just saw.
Microsoft Word vs Google Docs
Word and Google Docs are quite similar. They are both word processing software. Why was Google Docs able to take away market shares from Word while the new Dovrak and Colemak layouts weren’t able to compete with QWERTY?
Well, that’s because Google Docs is a pioneer in allowing multiple users to collaborate on a document online in real time. This convenient feature created a significant amount of value for users far beyond the improvement in efficiency delivered by the new keyboard layouts. The experience of this feature is intuitive and doesn’t require much learning. The value offered by this feature successfully differentiated Google Docs from Word and therefore enabled Google Docs to take away market share from Microsoft Word.
Google vs Bing
Now let’s compare Google and Bing. Both are search engines. As you may know, Bing recently got an upgrade which added AI capabilities. For this example, let’s just consider the version of Bing before the upgrade. Why wasn’t Bing able to take away Google’s market share?
Well, that’s because Bing is very similar to Google in terms of value proposition.
Bing failed to create a significant amount of new value for the users through unique features and therefore failed to create a competitive edge to differentiate itself from Google. Additionally, its results were often no better than Google’s, sometimes even slightly worse. Given the excellent search results that Google had provided and the large number of existing users it already had, it was hard for Bing to gain market share.
The Impact/Effort Matrix
Now that we’re aware of the potential impact of our idea, we can decide the best way to move forward using the impact/effort matrix.
If your idea has a lot of potential, then you should either work on it immediately or treat it like a major project with careful planning and execution, depending on how much effort is required to implement it.
And based on the matrix, if the impact of your idea is small, then you may want to either put it in the backlog or rethink the idea.
Lean Idea Testing
Finally, let’s see how Netflix founders tested their ideas to make sure that they find the right one to work on. It’s a great example of lean idea testing.
Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and its current CEO Reed Hastings. As you may know, before Netflix got into the video streaming business, it was about DVD rental. When Marc had this idea of doing DVD rental by mail, there was No DVD in 1997 in the market. So Marc mailed a CD to test the idea. Through the test, Marc was able to assess the feasibility of the idea from the business point of view and the customer point of view. Through this test, he was able to make sure that the idea would work before executing on it.
Testing ideas minimally is an art. It can be a challenge in itself, but it’s worth solving this challenge, because it’ll save you from a lot of frustrations down the road. So pay attention to the ideas that come from your experience in a problem, and the assumptions or intuitions you have, and think about how you can test them to see whether those ideas will work in the real world.
Last but not least, the ultimate indicator of the success of a product is enough active users, and the ultimate indicator of the success of a business is enough profit. If your idea cannot attract users or generate profit, it doesn’t matter how much pride you have for your idea, it’s still a failed one.
Books
If you’re interested in further developing your product thinking, check out these two books.