What makes a product good?

4 levels of goodness a product can have.

Making tools is an advantage of human beings. A product could also be seen as a tool. Through the years, we have been making products better and better. We want to have good products. But are the products we are using today good enough? What actually makes a product being considered as good? As an experience designer, I think there are 4 things that decide whether a product is good or not, and these 4 things also affect how good a product could be.

Usability

Good usability is usually considered a necessity. Bad usability is like the obstacles that stop you from using the product. You can feel friction and it drives you crazy, such as the text on a website is too small to read, doors that don’t imply to push or pull. Good usability, however, it’s not noticeable, you won’t feel it, it just works. Take the computer mouse for example, when you are using a computer with a mouse, most of the time, you probably will not think actively about how to manipulate the mouse to get your job done. Probably it’s even more obvious when you are gaming on a computer. It feels like the mouse becomes part of your arm.

Good usability in Apple. When you close a newly created document in the Page software, a dropdown window will be promoted to the user to save or delete the document. Notice that the Delete button is located on the left, far away from the Cancel and Save buttons. This is for preventing the user from accidentally clicking the delete button. Also the highlighted Save button further encourage the user to save the document to avoid unwanted loss of data.

Experience

Without good usability, a product is somehow ill, and it troubles the user. Good usability is something that the user wouldn’t even notice; the user simply takes it for granted. In other words, from bad usability to good usability, what really happened to the user’s feeling is that it changed from negative to neutral.

So, can a product do better? how can a product give the user positive feelings? We need to introduce the experience aspect to the product. If a product can provide a good experience to the user, make the user feel nice, then suddenly, the product is not just a passive tool that you use; it also actively gives you something nice, which makes the product be positive.

According to HCI professor Marc Hassenzahl, designing experience in a product requires thinking about why people experience a good experience. It’s because there are basic human needs in everyone, and when these needs get fulfilled, people feel happy. Some basic human needs are autonomy, competence, relatedness, popularity, security, etc.

Therefore, the key to designing a good experience is to find a way to fulfill one or more basic human need. Taking messages as an example: You feel happy when you get a message from your loved ones that you miss. This is because your need for relatedness gets fulfilled, rather than the fact that you get a message. You won’t feel happy if you get a spam message. So, to design the same experience, you don’t actually need to design another fancy messaging app. What you need, is a way to let a person be aware that her/his loved ones are thinking about her/him.

However, to get a good experience, you also need to reconsider the utility side of the product. One example would be the juicer. Electric juicers surely make your life easier. However, in the meantime, the machine also takes the experience of juicing away. When you are using a manual juicer, pressing down oranges to have orange juice is an experience. Some people do enjoy this experience, they like the control of the manual juicer which fulfills the autonomy need; also they enjoy a feeling of competence if they can actually make better-tasting juice. In addition, the noise from the electric juicer further reduces the its user experience. In this case, the electric juicer is surely the utility winner, but the manual juicer might be the experience winner.

Well-being

Are usability and experience enough to make a product good? Can a product be even better?

Good experience hocks the user, it makes the user keep engaging with the product. Of course, companies want their user to keep using their product, but will this benefit the user in the end? I believe that looking at the phone all day long is not something beneficial. But those apps I have on my phone all have nice user experiences, I couldn’t help to check them. Here we can see that, at a certain point, good experience might not benefit you, rather, it stops you from what you are supposed to do, it can be harmful to your well-being.

Digital Wellbeing turn app UI into greyscale.(source: androidpolice.com)

To cope with the overuse of smartphones, an app called “Digital Wellbeing” on Android tracks how much time you’ve spent on the apps and helps you leave the app with a change to greyscale user interface. The greyscale user interface is much less attractive than a colorful one. Therefore, it’s the lack of good experience that makes the user leave the phone. So in this case, the bad user experience actually saves you from the overuse and stops harming your well-being.

Another good example would be activity tracker apps, these apps persuade you to do exercise, such as go for a run. Some people do enjoy the run, but some certainly don’t. Do these activity tracker apps give you a good experience? I highly doubt it, if you don’t like doing exercise. But if the app can successfully persuade you to do exercise, and you are getting more fit, I believe you will still be happy in the end. Therefore, a product with the concern of well-being might be better than the one that only cares for good user experience.

Meaningfulness

Psychologist Martin Seligman talked about three types of happy life. The first kind is a hedonic life in which you try to have as much fun as you can, such as eating nice food, driving nice cars, having parties. This hedonic life sounds happy, but the pleasure brought by those activities disappears quickly, and people need a stronger incentive to feel the same amount of pleasure as time goes by.

The second kind of happy life is the good life, the life where you know and do what you are good at and enjoy. Because you do what you enjoy to do, you will often be in the flow state. When you are in a flow, even though you won’t feel anything, you are actually experiencing something better than the pleasure you get in the hedonic life, and the effect lasts longer. This is superior to the hedonic life.

The third kind of happy life is so-called meaningful life in which you do what you enjoy to do and in the meantime make a positive impact on something bigger. This meaningful life is the best kind of happy life.

If we reflect upon happy lives and product design, almost all the products existing today only help us to live a hedonic life. Since the meaningful life is the happiest life, if in the future a product can encourage and help us to live a meaningful life, I think this kind of product could be the best among all.

So..

As I discussed above, good usability is something that a good product can’t miss; being able to deliver a good experience is nice, but it also could be harmful. Caring for well-being is what every good product should do, and a product could be even better if it can help people to live a meaningful life. Now, it’s time for you to choose how good you want your next product be.

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