Designing towards an asymptote
Searching for variables in the product greatness function
Product managers often talk about building great products, but how do you judge what is great? A few years back, I set out to have this discussion with my product team. I had a hypothesis, so I ran a non-scientific experiment.
During a workshop, I told our team I was going to show logos of good and bad products, and I wanted them to identify which were which. As we flipped through the logos, the team could agree on some, but passionately disagreed on others. One person’s bad product was a love affair for someone else.
My hypothesis was confirmed (which was good because I didn’t have a backup): A product is great because the user says so.
Ok, well as a product manager that answer is kinda frustrating. That’s like one of those bosses who can’t tell you what they want but know it when they see it.
So, if beauty is purely in the eyes of the beholder, how do you systematically build great products? The first step is to simply stand on the shoulders of giants in design and usability. There are lots of great resources out there. Early on, Donald Norman had a huge influence on my thinking. I also think there is lots to learn from behavioral economics. I like The Dans — Dan Arielly and Daniel Kahneman (I’m not sure why all of these are Dudes whose name starts with D — I swear it’s a coincidence).
Beyond that, here are a few, somewhat random, observations I’ve compiled over time. What are yours?
Are you solving a utility need or an aspirational need?
There’s an old adage, do people need a drill or do they need a hole in a board? This is a great analogy, but perhaps only partly true. People have both tangible and emotional needs. I might need to drill some holes, but equally I might want to feel like an accomplished DIY’er with a big, yellow cordless drill which I will only use 2 times a year.
The Yeti brand of coolers is a great example of this. How many people need to keep beer cold for 7 days in 100 degree heat? I’d bet less than 5% of their customer base. How many of their customers want to be perceived as rugged outdoorsmen? I bet most.
I believe consumers decide to buy a product based on emotion and then justify it with facts.
Are you going to make me read a manual?
Are you giving me a user manual? Quick start guide? Stop it, just stop it. Those are crutches for poor design unless you are building an airplane.
Can someone pick up your product and immediately do something useful? Are they able to navigate intuitively and get out of situations easily? Now we’re talking.
Are you solving for simplicity or the lowest common denominator?
Simplicity is a hallmark of great products. But it should be balanced with more complex and efficient features for tasks that are repeated frequently.
A favorite example is the original Apple mouse. Apple famously was against right click on the mouse. This makes a lot of sense from a simplicity and discoverability standpoint. However, there was some really tasty functionality in that right-click menu — I’m looking at you, copy & paste! Given no right click, many power users opted for the Microsoft mouse as they migrated back to Macs. The MS mouse was dorky but great.
There are ways to have simplicity without dumbing down the experience. Are you building intuitive on-ramps with efficient short-cuts for power users? On the desktop, keyboard shortcuts are a great example of this design pattern. While I should be able to access most functionality from menus, there should be a corresponding keyboard shortcut for power users.
Is there ‘unexpected delight’?
When I first started at Google, there was this idea of incorporating unexpected delight in products. Not extraneous easter eggs, but rather functionality that was fun and useful, delighting the user in a somewhat unexpected way.
This may be by making the mundane playful. When we built the first Chromebook, the CR-48, myself and another PM, Ryan, looked at the safety card and thought “how can we get people to actually read these things?” Instead of dry legalese, we make it fun to read while still conveying the important information.
Zappos is great at unexpected delight. In their iPad app there is (or used to be) this hacky cat image that flies through the screen when you add something to your cart. It looks unpolished and janky, but at the same time it is totally fun (I’d love to know the backstory behind the cat).
Do you have any show-off features?
As a product manager, these aren’t going to make you any friends before launch. They tend to be strictly unnecessary but nice features. They are what you show off to your friends even if you’ll use them infrequently day-to-day. They are the hardest to get implemented as a PM because they will always get listed as a P2. And yet they are the features you will talk about to the media on launch day, not that low-level reliability bug that is P0 for shipping.
These things are essentially word-of-mouth marketing built as a product feature.
On the Chromebook Pixel we put a little lightbar on the back of the screen as a branding element. We wanted an easy way to tell battery charge without opening the computer, so we created a way for you to tap the lightbar and it would light up one of four bars to indicate charge level. The engineering team came up with a really clever way to use the accelerometer to achieve this, and while it added additional work and hardware, it was one of the most talked about features at launch.
Do you polish or do you push?
Sometimes called ‘the last 5%’, it’s that extra attention to detail, that extra polish, that ultimately takes a product into greatness. These are features that are easy to leave out, are hard to do, are hard to measure… and are so worth it if you want to go from good to great.
A hardware example I like to use is parting lines on plastic parts. When plastic parts are injection molded, the molds have two parts that come together and pull apart. Where they meet is a seam that can leave a little bit of plastic which forms the parting line. Good tooling minimizes or eliminates this line, which is much harder and expensive. That represents that last 5%.
In the race for speed or additional features, that polish often gets pushed to another release cycle or a future product.
Now, it should be said that pushing instead of polishing may be the right business call, which leads me to the last point.
Do great products matter?
Great products often aren’t the winners of market share, in the same way that great musicians don’t always get famous and great athletes don’t always make the most money. But at the end of the day, as a Product Manager it is your job to get that product as close to greatness as you can while ultimately achieving the biggest impact possible.
Good luck.
