It’s more important than ever to validate your digital products

The current situation is forcing all types of businesses to digitise their products and services — and fast.

With many in highly-regulated sectors such as financial services and utilities burdened by outdated legacy systems and risk management, sticking with paper or telephone-based systems may have seemed like an easier option.

But this is no bad thing. It may be the push many businesses need. The kind of data capture that you can achieve with a digital process, as well as vast amounts of time and money saved in labour costs, are well worth the initial investment.

However, digitising your product offering is not as easy as it looks. Even with something that on the surface may seem simple, like a form-fill.

The temptation during these challenging and unprecedented times may be to rush products to market, but don’t — you can get a better product to market fast with a robust validation process in place. And by validating and de-risking your approach, the product will provide value for you long after the current crisis has (hopefully) passed.

Potato has been specialising in developing purposeful and effective digital products for ten years. Initially born out of Google, we honed our craft as a web development agency before becoming a fully grown digital product studio, working with the likes of Mozilla, the BBC, Amazon Alexa and Cambridge Audio.

A recent digitisation project we worked on took less than 6 weeks start to finish (build time: 4 weeks). Potato was selected by financial services institution NatWest to develop a digitised application process for Trade Guarantees, a financial product for businesses. This would involve turning a rough and ready prototype into a fully coded Minimum Viable Product inside a very tight deadline, with a view to unlocking additional funding for future iterations.

We addressed the original challenge, but made fairly major improvements to the design, both visually and in terms of the interactions required in complex real-world use cases that hadn’t been apparent in lab-scenario user testing. Potato was inspired to challenge the original designs we were given, while our team worked very closely with the client to contribute design assets to their internal toolkit. Our UI work has now been incorporated into NatWest core brand guidelines.

Key to our test and learn approach was considering ‘lightweight’ alternatives to a fully digitised process, such as emailing the customer updates to their application. We also helped the NatWest product team design and present an approach for further development and improvement of the service based on ongoing user insights.

As well as adding a host of other instant benefits, the prototype immediately more than doubled the amount of correct-first-time applications, with one user exclaiming that ‘they were actually looking forward to applying for their next guarantee’.

That’s the impact that a carefully considered digital product can — and should — have.

With established providers across all sectors struggling to keep pace with their customer’s expectations — despite their size and ample resources — the need now to improve their digital offering is more prominent than ever. What’s more, your digital products will have to work harder for you now than ever before; catering to multiple audiences, many of whom will be non-digital natives.

This is why validation of a potential new product, with meaningful user research, testing and iteration, needs to take place.

Real customers, testing, feedback: this must be done early, and efficiently — not half-heartedly and when it’s too late. Don’t leap from problem to solution without validation in between. The output will be products that provide only the obvious answer, based on initial hunches and guesswork, without going through a user and stakeholder-led process of validation.

It can be hard to get things done internally, sometimes outsourcing is the best way. An agile external partner can bring the right talent, culture, teams and ways of working to “prove by doing” and start embedding effective innovation practices within the organisation.

If you’d like to chat further, get in touch at phil.wright@potatolondon.com

Potato is an award-winning digital product studio, which develops purposeful and effective digital products and services that have a positive impact on people and the world around them. Founded in 2010, we’re now 90 people strong across our studios in London and San Francisco.