Which Is King: Features, User Experience, or Design?
Design doesn’t matter. No, features don’t matter if the user experience is bad. No, user experience and design don’t matter if the product doesn’t have the right features. These kinds of statements come all the time in both startups and established tech companies. So who’s right. Which matters most: features, user experience, or design?
Do Features Matter?
If you are a startup, I dare you to go to a venture capital firm and start listing off all the features that your product has. You’ll be out of the door faster than you can say “geo-enabled, dynamic, and asynchronous location logging feature.” I double dare you to go to complete strangers and try the same exercise. They will break into a full out sprint before you get to “geo-enabled, dyn…” Your long list of features doesn’t matter, but what makes your product truly unique are usually two or three key features. In fact, a startup’s ability to concisely articulate the essence of its product is strongly correlated with its long-term success.
Think about the world’s biggest tech products. For Twitter, the top three features might be:
- Ability to post short updates that are less than 140 characters.
- Ability to follow like-minded people.
- Ability to see your connections’ updates in real time.
It’s trickier to distill some products into their essence, but the success of almost all products depends on just a few key features. Great product leaders and entrepreneurs know this. That is why Paul Buchheit, the product genius responsible for Gmail chose to focus on three key features: ability to search conversations, huge storage, and threaded email conversations. Paul Buchheit admits that “the secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent” from the initial version of the now ubiquitous online email app.
Another great, documented example comes from one of the fastest-growing business apps of all time, Slack. Stewart Butterfield shared that one of the keys to Slack’s astronomical growth was a laser-like focus on three main features: search, synchronization, and simple file-sharing. Focusing on one to three key feature is a common trait among many other hugely successful products such as Gmail, Slack, and LinkedIn. (By the way, this is also what makes brands successful).
If you come from a corporate setting the above philosophy might be quite alien for you. That is because corporations are fundamentally different than startups in a number of ways that allows them to be profligate and still survive. For one, many corporations have a captive audience. Take a large bank for example. It matters little what are the three key features of their online banking app because their customers are unlikely to leave simply because the app doesn’t have a powerful search. That is why if you’ve ever worked on a product in a corporate setting, you are probably used to seeing feature requirements documents with dozens of features and hundreds of pages long.
So, do features matter? Of course they do! However, all features are not created equal. Just two or three features will make a product unique and competitive in a marketplace. They will give that product its identity or essence. The other features are much less important and are distant second-order and third-order effects.
But how do features relate to user experience and design? Glad you asked. Read on.
Does User Experience Matter?
Before we dive into this fascinating question, let’s just get our terminology straight. User experience (often abbreviated UX) is a term that get’s thrown around so much that it has increasingly little meaning. In the broadest sense, user experience is the product in its entirety: the features, the implementation of those features, the visual design, even text and other media. (Montparnas has a great, classic article explaining user experience design.) However, when many people mention “user experience” they really mean “usability,” or the ease with which people use a product. For the sake of argument and to reduce the overlap between user experience, features, and design, let’s stick with that interpretation. User experience = usability, ease-of-use.
So, does user experience matter? It matters for three key features and as the product matures. Let me explain.
What would happen if Gmail’s search was hidden at the very bottom of the page (bad usability)? It would hardly be used and that key, distinguishing feature that Paul Buchheit and his team worked so hard to perfect would have little effect on the adoption and engagement of Gmail. On the other hand, what would happen if a Gmail setting was poorly labeled with no hints rather than intuitively labeled with good help text? Practically nothing. Therefore, usability does matter a lot for key features and less for secondary and tertiary features.
Now compare the usability of a newly-launched product to that of an established app. It goes without saying that young products have more egregious usability problems than mature products. This is because the key features of the product that give it its identity are primarily responsible for ensuring product-market fit. When Slack was launching, it certainly wouldn’t have mattered that a single form element in the settings would have stifled its exponential growth, but if file sharing was difficult that might have changed its trajectory.
When a product becomes mature, two important things happen. Features get added and competitors enter the market place. That means that all those little usability problems on secondary features start to add up, and although a few usability problems eroding growth by 0.001% is not a big deal, a hundred of them becomes a big deal. Whereas a product might have been a little sloppy in startup mode, it cannot afford to give up even a fraction of a percentage point in growth when the competition heats up. Both these factors combined means that user experience matters more as the product matures.
Does Design Matter?
Once again, the term “design” gets thrown around a lot. Usually people mean “visual design” when they say “design.” However, as I mentioned above, visual design is one component of the overall product and user experience. To keep things simple and discrete, I’m going to assume that design means appearance or visual design, which is different from how things work and how easy a product is to use (usability).
When you think about the most beautiful interactive products, which products come to mind? Tumblr, Pinterest, Slack, Facebook, GMail, Wikipedia. Wait, what?!
When you buy a pair of jean, how much do aesthetics matter? A lot probably. When you buy a rain coat, how much do aesthetics matter? Less so. When you buy a lawnmower, how much do aesthetics matter? I don’t give a damn as long as it starts and does a good job mowing my lawn. Just like physical products, interactive products run on a continuum between aesthetics and utility. Paintings, clothing, jewelry are on one side and things like power tools are on the other side.
Take a look at the latest Webby Awards for visual design, and what do you see? Products like Tumblr whose key feature is the appearance of the posts. For some products like Pinterest, the actual visual design is a critical characteristic of the product itself. If Pinterest did not display shared images in a tile format, would it have had the same level of adoption? Probably not because it would have been just like the million other image sharing sites out there. On the other hand, remember what Twitter looked like when it started?
When Gmail launched, did it matter that its design was — shall we say — basic? Probably not much because it did key things that users needed and did them extremely well. There are countless other examples of now hugely successful products like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook that gained enormous user bases despite starting with bad visual design.
So, does design matter? Yes, it matters for products where the appearance of a feature is a key characteristic. Design matters less for products where the key features are utilitarian.
What Matters Most: Features, User Experience, or Design?
In most cases, a few key features define the essence of a product and are primarily responsible for product-market fit. What if the product has the right key features but is difficult to use and looks terrible? Those key features are much less effective if their user experience and design are bad. What if the product has the right key features and is beautifully designed but has terrible usability? That also will not work, but it’s better than not having the right features. What if the product has the right features, is easy to use, but the design is bad? That usually works if the product is utilitarian and does not rely on the aesthetics as a key feature.
So what does this all mean? At the outset, features are usually most important with the caveat that only the key features matter. User experience is also important but reliant on the right features. Design is typically least important, but can be critical for certain kinds of products. As products mature, user experience (usability) and design become more and more important when complexity increases and marketplace competition heats up. Depending on where you are in the product lifecycle (startup to mature product), how much emphasis you place on each must vary.
