Simple Nudging Towards User-Centric Product Development

From the Ideal to the Real

Many product creators and designers understand the importance of being user-centric and how it can inspire the creation of better products. But like many things in life, being aware of something not necessarily lead to a change in behavior. Gap exists between knowing and doing, between the ideal and the real. 

As an analogy, the ideal is the top of a hill you’re trying to climb, something you know it’s there and something you aspire to reach. And the real is the climbing you have to do in order to reach the top. For your hill climbing adventure, there are three useful tools you need to bring along. The tools are the necessary gears that can help you to reach the desired destination. The three are mindset, aim for small wins and user observation.

Mindset matters

Mindset is a way to seeing and a way of not seeing. It affects the way you perceive the world. Stuff that lurks in the background, for example, can become starkly obvious with just a shift in mindset. To create a better product, start by embracing a way of seeing your product with your users’ worldview. The mindset requires placing user front and center when you’re designing a product or creating a feature. Ask questions like “Will user choose to use this feature?” “Why would user choose our product over our competitors’?” “Can customer use our app without any help?” and “How can we make it easier for users to learn to use our product?”. This thinking habit anchors your attention to the North Star of your product - the users.

Aim for small wins

Start doing simple thing. Don’t overcomplicate. Simple things such as using interactive prototypes for features discovery or writing a mock press release before you start building a new feature. Modern prototyping tools like Framer, Sketch and Figma are easy to learn and use, even for non-designers, with minimal cost and time commitments. The mock press release forces you to express clearly the values you intend to deliver to your customers. You can’t get it right the first time. And that’s ok. The important thing to remember is to never stop iterating and gain forward momentum. Gradatim ferociter means step by step, ferociously (in Latin), aptly capture the spirit — Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, adopted the phrase as its motto. Share outcomes, results and learnings with co-workers and superiors. This builds trust. With the trust, it becomes easier to convince team members to adopt and habituate user-centric techniques and processes. 

Be like ethnographer

It’s better to see what people do rather than documenting what they say. Get out of the office and observe your users in their natural habitats. Don’t just rely on the reports by the user research team. When I helped users to sign-up for our consumer payment app at marketing events, I gained plenty of eye-opening insights. What I thought was sensible interaction design actually confused users. The experience made me realized how important it is to get a first-hand view of how actual users actually use our product. Yes, a simple act like observing users using your product can provide you a meaningful perspective shift.

Creating useful products is a worthwhile endeavor and it takes a lot of ingenuity and perseverance. The article may seem like a poetic desire to compress the complexity of user-centric product development into three tools. But the goal here is to use the tools as a starting point. The tools are simple enough to put into practice and effective enough to act as a lever for the creation of an innovation culture.

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Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash