2016 Holiday Party: Great Product Design

Product Design At Its Best

SC Moatti (Products That Count Founder)

Today, we are much more connected to mobile products. In other words, our experience with these products is much more personalized. To create effective mobile products for today’s customer needs, I have identified three essential rules for mobile product design.

• Mind (Learning): Great mobile products are those that learn the behaviors of customers. Said differently, mobile products must use real-world input and feedback from its users in order to continuously improve.
• Spirit (Meaning): We all want meaning in our lives. Mobile products are at their best when they give us a personalized experience. Ultimately, users should feel a strong connection when using your product.
• Body (Beauty): Everyone seeks to feel good about how they look or how they operate within their daily routine. The experience we have with mobile products should be beautiful in delivering a seamless and efficient experience.

Shawn Carolan (Menlo Ventures Partner)

In my experience, product design must be driven by clarity of purpose. Simply put, your product must deliver clear value and provide an essential service for customers. Toilet plungers illustrate this point perfectly. By no means is this a groundbreaking product in terms of innovation, but it serves a very clear purpose.

Conversely, Google spent over $1 billion developing Google Plus. Even with very smart people thinking through its features and developing this service, it has not caught on. For example, if you want to share a photo, you’re not going to use Google Plus because none of your friends use it. Furthermore, you’re not going to use Google Plus as a primary messenger service. Simply put, product design that lacks purpose will ultimately result in failure.

Jon Kaufman (H2Opendoors Director)

When you’re looking at big numbers with product design, it’s hard for consumers to fully comprehend what you’re talking about. In other words, you can rattle off stats about hundreds of thousands of people suffering and people will glaze over because they aren’t able to process these figures. Instead, I like to use smaller numbers that make the impact more relatable.

For example, imagine if 11 jumbo-jets filled with 5-year-old children crashed every day and there weren’t survivors. This scenario involves the suffering of 100,000+ people every year – but you’re not leading with a big number. Instead, you’re introducing a story that deals with simpler terms that still generates the “wow factor” of big numbers.

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