Cultivating the right mindset for Product Design
An incredibly important step in designing great products is to invest energy in cultivating the right mindset within the team for solving problems. Here are a few gems:
Evan Williams, CEO of Medium, Founder of Blogger and Twitter
• Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company — Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.
• …people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.
BJ Fogg, Founder at Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Author of Persuasive Technology
• Three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger.
• When motivation is high, you can get people to do hard things. But once it drops (the wave subsides, then people will only do easy things).
• Ability: make the target behavior easier to do. Simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource at that moment. (structure future behavior, reduce barriers with tiny habits, increase capability using baby steps)
• An effective Trigger for a small behavior can lead people to perform harder behaviors.
Charles Duhigg, Author of the Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at The New York Times
There is a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: A cue → a routine → a reward. (Back to Cue)
Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
• Connect a user’s problem to your solution by using the Hook Model
• A hook has 4 parts: trigger, action, reward, investment
• Trigger: What internal trigger is the product addressing
• Trigger: What external trigger gets the user to the product
• Action: What is the simplest action in anticipation of the reward
• Reward: Is the reward fulfulling, yet leaves the user wanting more
• Reward: There are three types of rewards- Tribe, Hunt and Self
• Investment: What “bit of work” is done to increase the likelihood of returning?
Eliel Saarinen, Finnish Architect
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
Dane Petersen, Adaptive Path
A user’s experience emerges from qualities like Motivation, Expectations, Perception, Abilities, Flow, and Culture. When a person engages with your products, services, and environments, a set of distinctly human qualities comes into play. A person’s experience emerges from these qualities:
Motivations: why they are engaged with your offering, and what they hope to get out of it
Expectations: the preconceptions they bring to how something works
Perceptions: the ways in which your offering affects their senses (see, hear, touch, smell, taste)
Abilities: how they are able to cognitively and physically interact with your offering
Flow: how they engage with your offering over time
Culture: the framework of codes (manners, language, rituals), behavioral norms, and systems of belief within which the person operates.
Will Evans, Semantic Foundry
The reality of designing modern digital solutions is that no individual can solely capture all the complexity of creating a truly vibrant product with various customer engagement points, different usage patterns, and behaviors based on complex needs, goals, and customer backgrounds, all interwoven into an emergent, ubiquitous engagement tapestry. This is why innovation really is, and should be, a team sport.
Simon Rucker, Harvard Business Review
Good designers aim to move beyond what you get from simply asking consumers what they need and want. First of all because they understand that most people when asked don’t say what they mean or mean what they say, but also because people often don’t know. Good designers want to unearth what consumers can’t tell them: latent & emerging needs and motivations; actual behaviors and attitudes; and, crucially, barriers to as well as drivers of change — or simply put, what your competitors don’t also already know.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.
Janice Fraser, Entrepreneur, Startup Coach
• Keep your inventory low, make the cost of making mistakes low
• Talk to your customers
• Focus on solving the right problem
• Make something they want; Generate many options, decide quickly which to pursue
• Recognize hypotheses and validate them, Prove your ideas and your interfaces
• Get comfortable throwing away stuff you make
• Learn and Improve, in rapid cycles
• Externalize your thoughts to ensure everyone is on the same page and understand things better
• Users → needs (intersect with business vision) → uses → features → user stories → releases
Tony Fadell, Founder/CEO of Nest and angel investor
• You don’t need everything in your first product
• Always start with the differentiation.
• If you really are differentiating, you’re going to experience self-doubt.
• Get to a milestone sooner than you think.
• Set constraints. If you don’t have constraints, make some up.
• Always be learning.
I’ve learned a lot from experts talking about what they feel has been essential to their success. From my practice, I have come to realize certain principles that have been crucial in the success of many teams I’ve been a part of.
I’ve found it incredibly important to establish the core values of a team early. Facilitating a collaborative exercise where everyone in the team gets to voice their opinion on what habits, practices and beliefs are the most important to them helps here. This lets everyone feel heard. It also gets everyone to empathize and be aware of other team members’ needs better. This is turn lets the team have a respectful dynamic.
I have also realized that explicitly agreeing on delivering value to our products’ users day in and day out helps everyone be on the same page. It helps kickstart discussions around creating engaging and habit forming products. It also helps refocus people’s energy away from distractions and unimportant points of disagreements as they inevitably arise.
Creating a mindset that values constant improvement by regularly leveraging feedback from relevant people such as the users, experts and stakeholders, has also been critical to the success of a team.
Finally, it’s been the most important to keep being aware of the happiness levels and motivation level of a team. It starts with the team attacking an important area of focus worth investing time of their life in. It ends with leaders implementing measures to cultivate a healthy culture that values having fun and working hard equally.
