User Centered Design Tip #3 • The Whole-Product
TIP #3: A product (Device, Software, Service) is also composed of its user support.
Technical note on Tip #3
Usually we dream up and design a product, then we develop it. At the end of the process, we think about user support, maintenance, a transition plan to other products and more.
Sometimes we try to think of these points in advance, but often it’s to support them with corporate solutions (already existing), not especially designed for this product.
For users, this results mainly in a descending emotional curve. The product was great then… argh!… the support was odd, different from the feeling they had with the use of the product or during the sales process.
In fact a product is a whole-product*, larger than the main object of design, including many components such as:
- first, its promotion (some prefer to say “marketing”)
- then, its acquisition or registering (user account creation)
- followed by on-boarding (the time to enter in the product, start to learn it…)
- continuing with the main part, its utilization, with the yield of results of use it
- then, it could be possibly found problems, support requests, repairing…
- next is contract renewing, resigning, model changing…
- and finally have the product replacement to the benefit of an other product of the same company or not
What about a design that leads to different experiences and emotions for each of these components of the whole-product?
Try to imagine this phenomenon with your bank, your TV subscription, your truck or your freight deal. You have a good feeling while purchasing your new car, but when it comes time to repair it you discover the maintenance network is over-jammed and it will take months to fix.
Indeed, we could ask what the user experience is for each part of a whole-product. The complete experience probably includes several bad experiences because of these descending emotional curves related to component design differences.
When the whole-product is taken into account at the design stage, this will allow for a true, complete integration of all parts… providing a coherent and homogeneous experience to users, and reducing, if not avoiding altogether, descending emotional curves.
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Luc-Olivier Lafeuille
linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucolivier/
Drawing of Julie Lafeuille
linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-lafeuille/
All the tips on the Medium publication “Design Tips” or in French “Conseils de Conception”.
All the technical notes on de-risking innovative projects on the Medium publication “De-risk innovative projets” or in French “Dé-risquage des projets innovants”.
