How to make sure you’re really putting your users first
There’s been a huge focus over the last decade of getting user feedback early and often, thanks to the success of the lean startup movement and tech giants such as Amazon and Google. This has been great, and without doubt raised the quality bar for modern digital products, but how do you make sure you’re staying laser focussed on your users all of the time, not just at the points where you’re getting feedback? Here is some practical advice.
Product managers and designers have to be best friends
If they’re not on the same wavelength, then I’m afraid it’s not going to work. Product needs to involve design right from the start, so that they all get the vision and context first hand. Product managers need to be able to articulate clear objectives and metrics to give designers the space to come up with creative solutions.
Think hard, so that you can get your UX as right as you can first time
Yes, you’re going to get real user feedback as early as possible but it’s important that the feedback is on your very best effort. I’ve worked with lots of larger companies where apathy has set in after a design workshop and the team have settled with whatever the least controversial design route is. “We’ll find out if it doesn’t work when we AB test it” is just a lazy approach to me. You should only select your very best option(s) because they are going to take effort to design, prototype or build. You really need to think hard about the user experience, not necessarily longer, but harder!
Get into the mind of the most impatient person you know
A lot of product managers will talk about designing for a parent or grandparent, as they’re unlikely to be as technically literate as you. Not bad advice, but I think it’s better to design for the most impatient person you know. They probably are technically literate but just want to get their stuff done as quickly as possible. People want to do stuff quickly in the real world, but they rarely have that pressure in a usability lab. If you can, try and get feedback from your impatient friend with a prototype. Impatient people will usually be very direct, swear lots and probably insult you, but they’ll give great feedback.
Optimise for the most important jobs for your target user
Seems obvious, but ruthlessly focussing on helping your users get their core job done and eliminating things that get in their way is vital. It’s also a great way of helping you prioritise when your product starts to mature — how does the shiny new feature you’re building help your user get their core job done? If it doesn’t, then it may be doing more harm than good.
Concentrate on the majority of your users
In larger companies where there are lots of stakeholders it’s easy to give undue weighting to edge cases, just because a particular stakeholder cares about them. Sure, your product needs to handle the edge cases, but it doesn’t need to expose minor features with the same weighting as core functionality.
Look at this early WhatsApp example. I’m guessing well over 95% of people will just tap on ‘Continue’.
The edge cases are covered, there are links to explain the subscription and ad policy, but I’m thinking only a handful of users will tap on these. Most of them will just want to get started and message their friends. WhatsApp have placed an appropriate level of emphasis on the buttons and links.
Text matters
If you have a copyrighter on the team, that’s excellent. Often it falls to the product manager to write all of the text that appears on the product. If it does, then this needs to be taken very, very seriously. Using the right wording can make the difference between something that people can use right away and something that causes lots of confusion. Do it properly and create a document articulating your tone of voice, with examples, before writing your copy.
Everyone’s a new user at the start
Everyone will go through your sign up journey so you need to make this as easy and frictionless as you possibly can. If they have problems the first time, they’re unlikely to ever come back again, so your first use experience deserves lots of attention.
If you can do without it, you probably should
Generally the less you have on your page or screen the easier it’s going to be for your users. It’s very easy to add too much functionality and features, less is usually more. You shouldn’t be dogmatic about this, there are always situations where an extra screen or more guidance text makes sense.
Using these techniques will help you build more user focussed products. They don’t in any way replace frequent prototyping and user testing, but they will help it be more effective.
