How and why PMs should focus on crafting delightful user experiences instead of just shipping features

Lessons learnt from shipping features that broke the user experience

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

There is a significant downside to equating success to “shipping the feature” rather than evaluating the customer’s experience of the feature.

In such a scenario, its easy to lose sight of the wood for the trees. You are just ticking off a checklist when you are shipping a “useful feature”.

Ironically, shipping this “useful feature” has the exact opposite effect of your original intention— It does not end up being useful at all. Customer’s don’t use it or give up while trying to use it. Even if they do use it, they have tonnes of complaints and never seem to be happy.

Failures that serve as painful reminders

Here are some instances I can recall from my time as a PM at a virtual events platform:

• A visual enhancement meant to improve the live event experience invited a lot of backlash from one of our customer. (Reason: It broke the experience for the customer’s ongoing event and their participants had a tough time finding the activity of their choice)
• A promising new feature with the goal of increasing participant turnout caused a customer to churn because it had the opposite effect — decreasing participant turnout. The registration experience created confusion among registrants which led to a low turnout. (Reason: The product communication and edge cases were handled poorly.)
• One of our product capabilities pissed off a customer so much that he took to social media to vent his anger. (Reason: Some critical flows in the capability was missing. The existing capabilities were cumbersome to use and the customer had to spend lot of time just getting things to work)

All these instances serve as a painful reminder of the perils of being over obsessed with shipping.

When users are shortchanged through a poor user experience, they will likely churn.

What does ‘Delightful user experience’ mean

To me, user experience refers to the user’s journey of engaging with the product and deriving value from it.

Delightful user experience would be measured by how easy it is for the user to:

• Perform the intended task(s)
• Find features, set them up and reuse them
• Figure out how to proceed in case of an error or a failure

In addition, a delightful user experience also indicates the aesthetic appeal of the platform — which refers to the look & feel of the User Interface, the visual elements such as colors, typography, buttons used.

So, you can see that user experience goes much beyond just shipping a ‘useful’ feature.

It looks at the entirety of the user journey.

Steps to craft a delightful user experience

Here’s how you can focus on crafting a delightful user experience by looking at the various stages of the feature development lifecycle.

Design Phase

This is stage where you lay the foundation for crafting a delightful user experience.

Empower the design team to focus not just on the feature being built but also address the following:

• Problem being solved — Articulate the problem being solved. Revisit this continuously during the design phase to ensure your design solves the problem you set out to solve.
• Feature discovery — Where exactly does the feature show up in the product? Is it present at a place where the user is likely going to look for it.
• Feature onboarding —How will the experience of a first time user look like? How will they understand what the feature does? If they need more help, will there a handy help article/video for them to access?
• Feature workflow — How many steps does the user need to go through? What is the information shown at each step? Is the information necessary and sufficient for the user to proceed forward?
• Different user journeys — For platforms with different types of users (for eg. participant and event organizer), take care to craft and review each type of user’s journey independently. (Based on my experience, the user journey you ignore will come back to haunt you during the testing phase)
• Handling failures and errors — Its inevitable that your feature might fail in certain scenarios. (For eg. if you take a file as input, the file upload may fail due to its large size or incorrect format). May sure you have handled this through crisp, concise error messages. These should help the user understand what went wrong and how they can fix it.
• Aesthetics — Aesthetics refers to the visual elements such as typography, colors, buttons which determine the look and feel. Products which are designed aesthetically act as the icing on the cake and take the user experience to the next level. (Empower visual designer to work their magic here)

Before handing the feature off for development, its always a good idea to do usability testing of the feature with customers and internal teams.

Testing Phase

Testing out the product reveals gaps more efficiently than any other exercise. Until now, all you had were design screens. Now, you have a working version of the feature.

Here’s what I would recommend you to do.

• Test out the basic flows of the feature yourself — Don’t just rely on the QA team for testing. You know the ins and outs of the feature — Nobody else will notice the gaps you will.
• Invite team members from outside the tech team to test — Get people from the support and sales teams to test out the feature and give feedback. They will bring a fresh perspective that will leave you amazed.

Incorporating the gaps discovered during the testing phase helps polish the feature for release day.

Launch phase and Beyond

Your plan is to delight users and not surprise them.

Don’t release features without giving sufficient notice to the teams and customers on what’s being launched. The information should include — What’s being launched & when, problem being solved, customer benefits and a walkthrough video or screenshots.

Any potential impact on the existing workflows of customers should be called out so there is no disruption in the customer’s day-day activities.

Release complex features in Beta — It doesn’t matter how much effort you have put in to craft the user experience. Customer’s often test a feature to its limits. Having a ‘beta’ tag helps you set the right expectations with customers. It also helps the possibility of a quick rollback in case things don’t go according to plan. (Caution — Don’t let features stay indefinitely behind feature flags. Be aggressive on gathering feedback , iterating on it and making the feature available for all the relevant customers)

Keep track of the early adopters and ask them their experience — Talking to them gives you an insight on the customer perception. If the goal is to create exceptional experience, you shouldn’t be satisfied unless you hear superlatives from your customer — like “wow”, “amazing”, “exceptional”!

If you want to make your product a compelling proposition for the user, care must be taken to craft an exceptional user experience. This leaves a deep imprint on the user’s mind and creates a high recall value.

So, the next time you get to work — Don’t just build a useful feature. Focus on crafting delightful user experiences.

This will earn you customers who are not just paying users, but lifelong advocates and raving fans.