Walter - Principles of Product Design

Introducing the best practices, stories, and insights from the worlds top design leaders. Loaded with in-depth books, podcasts, and more, DesignBetter.Co is your essential guide to building remarkable products and teams.

Check out the rest of the DesignBetter.co library

DesignOps Handbook

Design Systems Handbook

Design Leadership Handbook

Design Thinking Handbook

Contents

Chapter01

Guess less

Stop wasting time

Have you ever bought a lottery ticket? I admit, Ive played a few times. You wont be surprised to learn I never did win the big jackpot. Seeing winners on the evening news gives the false impression that anyone could win, but the odds of winning are longvery long.

Rod Wolfe knows a thing or 2 about long odds. His friends call him Lightning Rod because hes been struck by lightning not once, but twice. What are the chances? Well, youre more likely to be the next Rod Wolfe than you are the next lottery winner.

The software industry has a lot in common with the lottery. We see big winners in the news everydayFacebook, Uber, Airbnb. Their success bolsters our ambitions of making the next big product. Our ambitions are big and we act fast hoping to beat competitors to the market.

Software success hinges on a lottery-like collection of variables: the right product with the right features for the right audience in the right market. If youre even a little bit off in your planning, you can end up wasting time and resources, and potentially put your company in a very difficult situation.

Daniel Burka GOOGLE VENTURES

Optimistic that they already understand how to design a winning product and eager to get to market, many companies dive straight into production without spending time learning about customers and their needs. They base their designs on guesses that make the odds of success long.

Erika Hall MULE DESIGN

Erika Hall MULE DESIGN

Buffer , a popular publishing platform for social networks, found itself in financial turmoil in part because theyd over-invested in products and features that werent relevant to their customers.

Joel Gascoigne CEO AT BUFFER

Buffer had to let 10 employees go and made painful budget cuts to recover. The good news is theyre starting to get back on track, but optimism and assumptions almost took them down. If youve spent time in the software industry you know Buffers story isnt unique.

So many companies base their strategies on optimistic guesses and get it wrong far too often.

Guessing is expensive if youre wrong you could be out of business.

Guessing puts you at a competitive disadvantage when you know little about the customers you serve, you know little about how to succeed.

Guessing is arrogant youre lying if you think you understand your customers without studying them first.

Theres a way to tweak your odds of succeeding, though. Rather than making assumptions about customers, we can start to learn from them. Customer research is easy to do and can be folded into any workflowSprints, Agile, Lean, whatever! As you start to think about customer research, youll probably find you have a lot of data already on hand that can inform your workyou just need to bring it to the surface.

Laura Martini GOOGLE

Laura Marini GOOGLE

Guessing makes your odds of success long. Lets stop playing the product design lottery and start getting the insights we need to make great products.

Heres how to do it.

Customer research fits into every workflow, every role, and every company size. Whether youre a designer, project manager, or director, the goal is to guess less and work from a position of being informed and confident.

Braden Kowitz GOOGLE VENTURES

There are 2 types of research you can do to learn about your customers:

• Quantitative: These are the things we can measure. Examples include analytics that communicate customer behavioral patterns and aggregate stats about customer cohorts.
• Qualitative: These are things that tell us about the qualities of a product or experience. Customer interviews, for example, give us insights about how a customer feels, which can provide a lot of insight into what motivates their behavior.

Think of quantitative and qualitative research as the Wonder Twins . They each have incredible powers, but theyre much more useful when they work together. Relying on 1 can sometimes lead you down the wrong path.

For instance, a couple years ago the user research team at MailChimp stumbled upon an interesting piece of quantitative data: many customers connected their Facebook accounts to their MailChimp accounts.

Based on the quantitative findings, the product team started to consider how to further the MailChimp-Facebook connection, but the qualitative findings from customer interviews told a different tale. Most customers only connected to Facebook because it seemed like something they should do given the social networks popularity, but they never actually did anything meaningful with the integration. The product team changed course once the qualitative findings clarified the motivations behind the customer behavior.

PRO TIP Quantitative and qualitative findings

Numbers give the illusion of certainty, but they can be misleading if not verified with qualitative findings.