5 Important Things to Remember when Designing a Product
By Frances Advincula As a software engineer who is primarily focused on the front end, I have to help ensure our products have a …
By Frances Advincula
As a software engineer who is primarily focused on the front end, I have to help ensure our products have a great user experience. Here are the top 5 lessons I have learned when helping design a new product, from simple things such as a school project to even more complex situations such as enterprise software. I hope you find them helpful!
1.Write problem scenarios because they are very effective ways of putting yourself in the user’s shoes. I think it is very hard for programmers to think as users. We automatically think of how to build something, and I think that almost always sacrifices usability. Before coming up with the right solutions for the user, we already think of how we are supposed to code that piece, which might result in us not building it because we are already aware of the technical difficulties. However, when we are forced to go think through each problem scenario, we are forced to think like a user, we started to feel their pain.
2.A great user experience is about solving problems. When I was doing usability testing for one prototype, nobody said, “Wow this feature is innovative!” but rather, “Wow, I wish they had this when I was looking for a job!” or “Wow, I wish they had this when I was trying to hire people for my startup!” Therefore, I have come to believe that a real breakthrough experience for a customer is about designing products that solve their problems. We find these problems by interviewing our customers, by going out in the field capturing their tacit knowledge. We further hone in what we think they want solved by putting ourselves in their shoes by writing scenarios, which we should validate early on with things like prototypes and usability tests.
3.Validate first (and early) and build later. By the time I had asked my users to validate a prototype I was working on, it was already a functional, good looking one made in Axure – complete with colors, links, and the like. I think that took away a lot of usability insights because my testers were distracted about the colors and not actual usability concerns such as page navigation, content, and flow. They were telling me things like, this color is not good. Or that the page was boring – like an airline website. Therefore, I think I should have definitely done low fidelity prototyping early on, so that users are fully (even in their subconscious) aware that these are mocks, so that we can all focus on actual usability and not the frivolous 2% of a prototype. Testing early on would have saved me a lot of hours that resulted in redesign. Don’t make my mistake!
4.Simple is not always better. We have all heard that simple is better, but we always have to balance (For example, popular software blogger and owner of software company Fog Creek Software – Joel Spolsky always has said that every time they release a new feature, their revenue spikes). When I was doing usability tests, a lot of my testers where asking why I didn’t have x feature and y feature. While we have to be careful not to choke the application with too many features, we do have to think if we are designing a solution that allows users to do what they want to do (which goes hand in hand with writing out the scenarios as I have mentioned.)
5.But simple things make a big impact. A lot of my users got confused because of labels, error messages, or even icons. Be especially careful with icons, especially for a global product. One icon might not necessarily translate from one culture to the next. We need to remember how little things can influence the user’s mental model in a big way, so keep your eye out for small fixes that make for a much better product.
Frances recently graduated with a degree in Computer Science and is currently pursuing a masters at Johns Hopkins. She now works as a Software Developer for Accenture Software. A proud geek girl, she’s sure she is the only one who can’t play video games. Tweet her at @FranAdvincula.
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