The Three Simple Steps of Developing Good Products
Thanks to the long years we spent working on product development, we have tremendous insight as to how the building blocks to developing good products are laid.
Product Management
If a product is to survive, its product manager should be able to say “no” to their boss when they feel its the right decision, as well as claiming ownership on the whole process, setting KPIs and doing their best to include the reluctant team members who are playing the “I told you so” card, while resting in the comfort zone.
If a product has no owner, it cannot survive!
UX Know How
In order to find the intersection point between the KPIs, objectives and the current level of experience in a product’s target audience, it is essential that the motivations and attitudes of the target audience are understood. This is where the ‘User Experience Studies’ come in.
Agile Development
After releasing a product with MVP, it is very important to break your steps into micro steps and swiftly prioritise between these, if you want to build your current product with the data at hand at a gradual pace. This is where Agile Development changes things by providing us with that level of flexibility.
When we manage to intersect these three points, we usually end up with what we call a “good product.” The studies that take place at the beginning of a “good product process” can be referred to as “Lean UX”.
A Case Study ‘Kasko123’
The best Lean UX case study that I have ever come across was when we developed a trial version of a company site named Kasko123. Before Kasko123 started working with us, they had had developed a fake main page and a fake insurance listing and monitored the user traffic with Adwords, to see how many people clicked on “Get a Rate”, and how many of them tried to purchase one of these fake offers. It is definitely a good strategy to work on a particular model to see if it works before investing on it.
It is not enough to simply develop a design as a whole and to feel you now have a role in the development of this “good product” by having “done your part”. In order to assume that role, you need to have optimisation services.
User research is not a viable metric in affirming design related decisions!
The Question
No matter how many people you talk to during the design process of a product, even if you have identified 75% of your problems by performing 5-user tests, or decided to ignore the concept of quantity thanks to ethnographic research, it still boils down to one simple question when you are about to make a million dollar design decision: how many people did you ask?
Million Dollar Design Decision
For instance, for the online marketplace Hepsiburada, the design of a categorised menu placed on top rather than the left side of the page, was what we might call a million dollar design decision and it was actually very risky to do so by relying on the results of a 200-person card grouping test, when the site itself has more than a million users and a wide variety of complex inner workings.
This called for a more sophisticated approach. With the A/B testing that was performed on mobile interfaces, 50% of the users were shown the previous 22 category menu, whereas the rest were shown the new 9 item menu. It was previously thought that some categories would affect sales as they would now be displayed as sub-menu items, but that did not happen, and the new menu actually passed the test.
The age old question “how many people did you ask?” now has a brand new, better answer.
