Human-Computer Interaction Archives

The Silent Salesman

I recently had the unique opportunity of meeting Ian Myles, who has done extensive work designing software and hardware products. He was leading a discussion amongst startup CEOs regarding the importance of user experience. No one will contest that user experience is important, but Ian took it a step further, and said its not just about making pretty apps. The reason user experience is important is because two products being equal in terms of functionality is when: “Design becomes the silent salesman.”

I thought about how true these words were, and how I myself had experienced this first hand at my last startup. Say what you will, but design was the key ingredient to Mint.com’s triumphant user growth and adoption over long time rival Intuit’s product QuickenOnline.

There are 3 questions that people need to answer when designing a product for any user base:

What is going to get people to try the product out i.e. compel them to click the sign up button?
How will you keep the user engaged once they sign up?
How will you retain them?

Let’s tackle the first question. As a startup you cannot rely on word of mouth marketing just yet, so to get people to sign up you need to have a landing site with a clear value proposition. I won’t bore you with landing site optimization techniques, you can read about those here. Just know that you need to think about how you will make the user that’s signing up feel like you’ve built an app just for them.

Pat yourself on the back if you’ve gotten users to sign up. The next challenge is to hold the user’s attention long enough so that they will feel like you met their the expectations that you set for them in your landing site’s value proposition i.e. if you’re going to make them more money, well then your product better start making them more money from the initial interaction! This part is hard, because you’re actually trying to do 2 things: making a lasting impression by making a positive impact on the current moment they are using your product. Hence, you’re right on the edge where people will immediately drop off or experience enough value to stick around and login another time.

The final question: how will you retain them? Sometimes I feel like people just don’t care enough about retention. I can’t blame them with advertising being an easy monetization scheme, but with advertising dollars becoming more scarce, vanity metrics like signups aren’t enough. For SaaS companies like my current startup, its even harder, you have to provide a clear value to get users to come back, and continue to augment your offerings if you want to retain users. So how do you retain them? User experience. Everything from the design of the product to clear messaging and customer service affects retention, because each one of these is an experience that your user is having with your company. Sure you can lock people into a long term contract, but those are for companies who are afraid that someone will figure out their product sucks once they’ve used it more than once. Or you can churn through signups but then how will you make money long term? You need a user base that is willing to pay you for something, part of that is paying you for the experience you are delivering.

Hence, putting thought into the overall experience a user has with your company and its products is the reason design is the silent salesman.

Make your idea a reality. Develop it! Learn the ins and outs of product development with @poornima ow.ly/ehBiA
— GA SF (@GA_SF) October 8, 2012

My Product Development Process

Design books are some of my most favorite and enlightening reads of all time like: Donald Norman’s DOET, John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity, and Indi Young’s book Mental Models. They bridge together reason, emotion, and the physical faculties of humans in order to create tools to help people live everyday. As an engineer I have designed software for years, but until my most recent startup I haven’t had the opportunity to actually design the user facing component of a product. Here are some key principles to I’ve been practicing:

1. Learn empathy through personas.

I’ve come across a lot of engineers who just build stuff and expect people to “get it”. Thats fine if everyone were alike, but we’re individuals, who have different experiences, tastes, and ways of thinking and interacting. Think about the guy who just got laid off and now has to spend the next 2 hours researching health insurance, then fax in documents, make a few phone calls – be transferred multiple times – only to find out that he has to now wait two weeks for someone to “approve” of his medical records. What if he has a congenital disease and his prescription ran out the day he got laid off?

Yes, it’s an extreme case but stress does factor into the way humans interact with products and services, which is why its important to develop personas. A persona is an abstract representation of a set of behaviors. The persona’s name connotes her behavior e.g. “Jill” the receptionist at a yoga studio. Personas need to be developed for the primary group of individuals that will be using your product.

Immerse yourself in your user’s environment, and even better live a few days of their life. You will retain the emotional response you had giving you more intuition when designing a solution to their problems.

2. Kill a tree.

I love building stuff and I hate wasting time. Its important to build the right thing. So instead of diving into coding up a web app, I created rough drafts of my product purely on paper, and then spent a month doing usability testing with over a handful of users in stages. At each stage I would iterate on the feedback I received from my users. Paper prototyping is a powerful process. I was able to gauge how users felt about my product versus the competition, what was missing from it, and what could be done to improve the experience of interacting with it. I also learned what users thought the most critical features was, which is essential to developing a prototype.

3. Shut up and listen.

Listen to the problems of your users. All of them! An easy exercise to break the ice is to have a user walk you through their day, and have them highlight all their pain points. What was the latest catastrophe in their life? How did they solve it or try to solve it? From this you will learn how your users think, interact, and solve problems without you. This has to be an ongoing dialogue because your users’ needs will change and they will keep having different experiences, so keep the channel open. Expose problems over time, analyze them one at a time, and then create a bigger picture of their needs.