Designing products people love (Book Review)
I would like to write a review about a great book entitled “Designing products people love: How great designers create successful products”.
It is written by Scott Hurff, who is a designer with 15 years of experience building digital products. He worked in companies like Tinder, and he has a valuable experience in the world of entrepreneurship
Meaningful notes
The approach of the book is on how, and that means there is a process that can help designers to achieve a successful product. This four phases are hunt and synthesize; build; test and level up; launch, monitor, and start over.
Inside the book, the process is fed by other designer’s experiences, and that let us have a base to follow our own path and strategies. In other words, the key of a successful product is the steps and decisions that we carry out. By doing so, we get a competitive advantage for all companies
I extracted four points from the book that I think are important to keep in mind.
1. The role of a product designer
“The proliferation of connectivity, mobile devices, and a cheap technology is making design more valuable than ever”
Facing this reality, many design jobs have been created and expanded. However, there is one that has been featured and we have to know: the product designer.
General speaking, product design is about understanding people, and it is a practice of empathy. It focuses on identifying the problem and the best solution.
It approaches the proper attributes of the product by thinking on the current constrains. The product designer has the knowledge of the process of bringing a product to life, and the responsible of a painstaking research, which it starts with the customer.
As product designers, we have to create something that people want to use. We need at least a light understanding in many fields such as engineer, business, sales, public-relations, anthropology, copywriting and others.
Besides, infusing the product with soul and personality is advantage to standing out from the competition. The aesthetic part is also important to show confidence and help users to enjoy the experience.
However…
“Ultimately, designing a product means designing something that sells.”
The purpose of a product is to find or create a customer. Customers make possible the existence of a company. This approach is to serve a customer. If the product doesn’t sell, the designer has not accomplished his purpose.
2. Learning to observe
Successful products start with observing what real people do — not what you think they do
You do not ask what they want, but rather you have to become the user. Live the same experience. Understand the culture around them, what motivates them. Avoid the idea that the product is awesome just because you created it. In this step, a customer research is suitable as well as being empathic.
We can take some techniques from ethnography, because through it we can learn what people is doing when nobody is looking, and the contexts in which customers might use the product.
Our more powerful tool is observation, because people behave differently or say different things depending on the context. You might behave differently with your parents than your friends. With observation in the right context, you will understand people behavior on their terms and not on yours.
Designers are not the owners of the truth. They cannot act through assumptions nor speculations, but rather facts. Listen, go outside, analyze patterns without bias. You will learn how to speak with your target, what to say to wake their interest. And, at the end, how to persuade them to use your product.
Start with pain and end with joy
Before deciding what product to build, start with identifying what is the pain of the customers that you want to reach. This a great source to prevent your product from failure. People tend to express their problems, because they do not expect that they can solve them.
“in order for someone to go on the Internet and ask a question of a group of strangers about how to solve their problem, it is a very strong indicator of the level of pain they’re in”
Get the major amount of information that you can. And internet is a great tool for this task. Find out the websites, online communities, facebook groups, blogs, products reviews that your customers tend to visit.
As a result, you will know what they want, how they perceive the world, how their problems change, and how to communicate in their words.
Then, analyze the frequency of pain. The more pain people undergo, the more they will need a solution. And that gives you the confidence of what product build. It is better to make a decision of the product when you have a study that supports the way you think. When you have your options, think if the product really makes your customer happy alleviating their pain.
3. Building phase
User flows
Start with words. Start with the copy (text). These are the base of the product. What is going to say the headlines? What is the current tone of the product? Do not include lorem ipsum (simulated text). You might include words with the jargon of your customer or those that are most recognizable for them, not for you.
The idea is to make easier for customers to understand the copy. For example, you must also include universal commands such as continue, next, ok or submit. However, the best messages include two words the describe the action like “Send message”.
You have to focus on the flows of the product, and not in the details like colors or typography. Worry about design later. Think how the customer is going to navigate throughout the interface. However, first, you should focus on the most important parts of the product, and that means the essence of it.
Write out the goals for each screen. List every component that could possibly be on the screen. Then, eliminate what you do not need. The most important actions should be in less clicks. All this steps will also help developers to get involved in the process.
Prototypes
Once you finish with the user flow, the next step is to get something working as soon as you can. And here the prototype is the hero, but it depends on who you talk to.
In this step, the product should be alive, with transitions and reactive to fingers. You can use tools like invision, origami, keynotes (when animation are key) and others.
The aim here is to test, prove an idea within a limited timeframe and budget. Moreover, the prototype will reflect who is going to see it. That will indicate you how far it must go, and it will help developers to have a clear idea of the functions. A successful prototype is a storytelling tool. Normally, this process takes one to two weeks.
But, you can give it more power when you are aware of when you need it, who is going to see it, how familiar you are with the tools you are using, how polished it needs to be.
User Interface
Pixel-perfect mockups are the ultimate communicator. After great user flows and prototypes, we move to the UI (User interface). This step is also useful to show the personality of the product.
But, many designers make a mistake, they forget some states and that is why the UI is incomplete. A great UI is when we consider the five states of interface design: ideal state; empty state, including first time use; error state, partial state, loading state.
The ideal state is what you want people to see frequently. Start with this state.
The empty state is what your customers see in their first use of the product. This process is known as onboarding. This step also includes screens when your customer deletes information. Finally, the empty state includes screens when there is nothing to show.
The error state are the screens when something goes wrong. For example, not valid form data or not connection to the server.
The partial state are the screens that encourage people to keep going to the ideal state. You can use micro-interactions for that purpose. For example graphics like bars that indicate the percentage or level of your profile of LinkedIn in order to achieve the 100 percent. Another example could be a checklist that indicate that there are two steps more to complete a process. So, copy is also important here.
And the last state is loading, when your product is waiting for connection or data you have to indicate that circumstance. To make people feel comfortable, we need to give a sign that something is happening
That will put the focus of the costumer in the indication of progress rather than the real loading progress made. You can also uso skeleton screens in the loading state in order to make a smooth transition into the content.
After that, it is important to consider the design across other devices, and a design for ergonomics, which means taking into account the move and reach of the thumb to touch the screen of a mobile.
And finally, increase the personality of the product with transitions and animations. Motion is humane and reflects the perform of the real world. It is functional and tells a story. It makes our products memorable and usable.
4. How to evaluate feedback
Hurff points out that there are three great sources to take into account in order to increase the value of your product. But, first of all, do not take feedback personally.
Your Team
Start with the people who helped to define the product. Gather a face-to-face feedback, analyze, review, critique the product. Congregate passionate and candid people from different areas such as sales, engineering, design or marketing. By doing so, you will get a set of valuable feedback.
In the case of designers, you can make a meeting for them, with a moderator, in which they can explain their process and reasons to carry out a decision, and critique each other’s work with the aim to increase the final outcome.
Current customers and/or clients
Many customers might be wrong and consider every one is a big mistake. The key here is to find the right customers and make a painstaking analysis of the obtained feedback based on the problem that you want to solve.
“Are you trying to enhance your signup process? Great. Find all the people who have just recently started the signup process — especially the ones that didn’t complete the flow”
It is time to know your data of customers. Everyone is different. Some of them have more experience using your product, others have more experience in some parts of the products, others are new. Every customer come from different contexts.
Potential customers and/or clients
One option, but could be risky is to congregate potencial customers from your customer research, because people do not know what they want. If you want to keep going with this option, you should approach customers individually with a prototype of what you want to taste.
In addition, you need a way to track the behavior of customers like record in video. However, this option is valuable when you want to evaluate your pitch.
A second option is to focus on the way people communicate, how they see the world, how they argue a particular point in orden to understand what people want, instead of asking them. This technique is called close read. This data is going to form patterns that is going to help you to make decisions based on facts. This point is related to observation, a topic that we discussed before.
In conclusion, this is just a short summary of the book. There is a great amount of detailed information inside. If you want to interact with this digital world, if you are an entrepreneur, a designer or a developer, you must read this book.
You can find it here.
