Make better design decisions through a value lens
As product/UX designers, we often work on new product features that will contribute to overall productivity growth. And oftentimes, we are part of the project from the beginning stages, thus we have a crucial role in the entire project. And of course, our decisions can make a huge impact on fostering the business.
There are two main things that a product team looks through to decide on what functionality should we build to achieve our business goal — value and complexity.
According to the productboard “Product value is the benefit that a customer gets by using a product to satisfy their needs minus associated costs. Complexity is the effort associated with delivering such a product to the customer”.
Therefore as a designer, looking at everything from a Value lens is the most important thing to make better decisions. For that, let’s understand product value.
Value of a product
I’m not at all a fan of following Jargons, but I might use them because some of you might have been familiar with those terms.
There are mainly two types of values -absolute value and relative value. absolute value refers to how well the feature is helping the user to achieve their needs whereas relative value is being calculated by comparing available alternative solutions in the market. We should deeply understand and keep an eye on these values while taking decisions to achieve our final objectives.
- Absolute value
Absolute value is obtained by providing delightful yet seamless experiences to the users. Ensure that the design approach we use is perfectly apt for this project to achieve the final goal.
For instance, if we are following the ‘design thinking’ approach, make sure that each phase's outcomes are right on track. Because after the discovery phase, if we fail to define the right problem then the entire project will be a disaster even though we are done with the perfect UX processes. At this stage, our task is not to solve all the problems but identify and define the core problem that should be solved elegantly to achieve the final goal. Focus on the key objectives. As a product/UX designer you guys must be doing this already(This is a large topic and we can discuss more in another article).
Never think that those UX design processes are the only items that contribute to the absolute value, but a beautifully crafted visual design and the efforts of multiple teams have a lot more to do here. Refer to my article about Create Emotional Design using UI, UX, and CX to understand why UX and UI have the same importance in a product.
- Relative value
As I mentioned earlier, relative value is calculated by comparing available alternative solutions in the market. It’s not as simple as it sounds when it comes to a real project. If we have an existing competitor and want to compete with them, it's hard. It’s really hard.
Because the total value of a product will increase over time even though there is no change/improvements in the existing experience design. The human brain tends to settle down into the strong habitual behavior of that product. Thus their cognitive effort becomes very less and that makes the new product feels unknown. John T . Gourville, a professor at Harvard Business School, states that the difference in value between a new product and an existing product must be up to 900% for users to adopt the new product.
Design decisions based on perceived value
Perceived value is a customer’s own perception of a product or service’s merit or desirability to them, especially in comparison to a competitor’s product.
Taking care of this perceived value is crucial thing when it comes to decision-making. Always make decisions that would perfectly match the perceived value we obtained from marketing materials and other trigger points. From my personal experience, two major practices would help us to keep this value to obtain trust.
- Set the right expectations. Make sure that we are putting the right and useful information on those trigger points. Otherwise, when they get to know the real value is lower than expected, the missing value will be perceived as a loss. Based on user psychology loss is twice as powerful as gain. This loss aversion is directly proportional to drop-offs.
- Don’t fail to introduce your new feature to the users. They should feel it’s worthy and special as we do. If we are not setting expectations and still they find the feature by exploring the app, that’s good. But users can also be confused over the product’s behavior. This would not help the growth as much as good expectation settings do.
A product has a set of features that are combined to give the product value. But in most cases, there will be some major features that produce the major share of the product value. Therefore, whenever we are creating a new feature, make sure that it doesn’t affect our core features by making the product complex, or adding more cognitive loads.
Takeaways
Overall, creating product value is a collective responsibility of every member of the company. But by looking through these value lenses, we designers can take crucial decisions that push our product to grow high by helping the users to achieve their goals.
The topics here I mentioned were huge and I was only going through the areas that I think would help product/UX designers to take decisions.
