A recipe for great product design

Three major things have helped me build great design into our product, Check, a mobile payment service used by more than 10 million people to pay their bills. The first (and really, most important) is UX. User experience should be top of mind in everything you and your company do. Think about what the product value proposition is, what problem you are solving and why your customers should use your product. Then think about what the product functionality needs to be to deliver on those things, and THEN, design. Remember, a “beautiful app” is just a means to the goal; it is not the goal by itself.

The next thing to remember is great ideas that fulfill your product vision can come from ANYWHERE, not simply your product team. Encourage everyone in the company (no matter what department they work in) to think about new ideas. At Check, we have a couple of “Innovation Days” throughout the year to spur this, and regularly ask people outside the company and our customers for their input. Hearing what others think and then building on/refining those ideas gives us a much stronger value proposition than what we started with.

The third and final aspect to consider is magic. There are millions of great products with genius design out there, but only a few that truly take consumers to a different place all together. That element of transformation is what I like to call magic. When you design, think about what can push the product beyond its boundaries and transform it all together. Stumbling upon “magic” is not overnight and usually involves plenty of experimentation. No product, app or service is perfect out of the gate, and the best ones are continually improving and asking what’s next for my customer?

Great concepts and design need a starting point, so do not be afraid to experiment and invest in new ideas and technologies. Though it may appear risky, striving for this magic is what sets successful companies, such as Uber or Nest, apart from the rest.