Sep 2, 2020. Updated: Aug 14, 2023.

Designing a Product

The easiest way to get a product idea is to hunt for complaints that something is not working, too complex, too hard, too inconvenient, not likeable, unsafe, and so on. There lies your opportunity. Post the discovery, evaluate how many users have the same or similar complaints — there lies your user base. Then, find a solution to the problem — there lies your product. Make it using an optimised process — there lies your pricing.

To understand what the market needs, it will be beneficial if the marketer is a consumer too, or at least is capable of empathising and thinking like a consumer. Only then can he catch true problems, test and verify them to be profitably solved.

Whereas, to understand what the market wants, all one must do is simply ask the participants. Be vary that people are often wrong about the reasons behind their decisions; behind their whys. Take the examples of why people vote and why people buy insurances; one can find disparities in what they say is their motivation and what the actual motivation is. While people claim to vote for development, they actually for vote their ideological inclination. Similarly, people buy insurances for peace of mind; not for the stated reason an actual rainy day. And the amazing thing is that people don't even realise this disparity. They are not lying, they are simply experiencing a cognitive hack.

So is the case with market surveys and researches. They must not be taken for its face value since they are not as accurate as scientific researches are. Unlike a scientific study, a market research does not verify the answers of the respondents; they merely curate them. People are subject to cognitive biases and often end up being wrong about why they do certain things. Market surveys and researches are pretty reliable to finding out if a customer does something, what she does and how she does. However, because people are victims of their own cognitive bias, the reliability of market surveys and researches declines when it comes to explaining why she does that.

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To build products thereafter, a marketer must understand that a design that satisfies both the functional competence and sensory appeal is the ultimate design; and a functional design with inferior sensory appeal has more value than a sensory pleasing design with pathetic functionality. Sensory appeal includes aesthetics, colour schemes, textures, smell, weight, etc. To create lasting designs, design for consumers' needs, not for their wants. Wants are psychological and momentary, while needs are the ground zero reality.

A design must have a goal; it must lead the user to do something easily, quickly¹ and with sensory pleasing; easily — because please don't like to be confused, quickly — because time is not a luxury; and pleasing their senses because people cultivate a liking for products that trigger sensory pleasures. It is recommended that the design must have one and only one goal, but at times incorporating multiple goals into one design is sensible. Whatever the number of goals are, it must not confuse the user in using the product or increase the complexity of usage.

A design must never be such that it works only when users are right or consistent with their use of the product. It is human nature to err, and inconsistency, disorder and chaos are universal realities. Therefore, it is sensible to account for human fallibility and inconsistency in designs to a reasonable extent.

A design should be so immersive that users do not realise the product at all while using it. Good design becomes evident only when users migrate to a bad design. When you migrate from bad design to a good one, the goodness of the good design is only slightly noticed. But when you migrate from a good design to a bad one, the goodness of the good design is evidently noticeable.

The reason for the difference in the degree of notice-ability is your acclimatisation to a particular design. Both migrations will confuse you; only that the degree of confusion will be varying. When you migrate from a bad design to a good one, the confusion is eliminated soon because you figure out the design and then get immersed in the effortlessness of the good design; thus making the good design less noticeable. Whereas, when you migrate from a good design to a bad one, the confusion alleviates as you gradually figure out the design. But the effortfullness of the bad design will remind you always of the old good design; thus making the good design more noticeable.

A design must never be stagnant. When things aren't working as intended with a substantial number of complaints from users, the "what" question is already answered and a designer has the direction to work on. Only the "how" must be realised. However, when everything is working as intended and there are no complaints, the direction to work is unclear. The "what" question is unanswered and consequently, the "how" question as well. It takes some knowledge of human mind, keen observations and out of the box thinking to get direction here.

Unless you get a clear direction to take the design to, do not change the existing design. Doing so is a clear violation of the age old adage: don't fix what is not broken. Some designs are almost perfect that you see no room for further improvements. Leave them alone.

Consumers have an inclination to repair the products they buy. But the ability to easily repair products is a trade off with something else that consumers value too. Unless there is some really good design reasons to implement designs that inhibit repair, do not do so.

Whatever repairing flexibility your designs give to consumers, be honest about it with them. Tell them to what degree is the product repairable. If there is scope for two product designs — one with easily repairability and the other with less repairability but with some other value — offer two variants.

Product design continues to ensuring that consumers received what they paid for and that the product performed as expected. The results will be of immense value for the next design iteration.

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There is a quote by Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, that is often discussed aggressively among marketers,

Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.

Many have misunderstood this quote to be about advertisements. This quote is about product design. A good design does not speak for itself because it's goal is to be so immersive that the goodness of the design isn't even noticed. It speaks for itself only when a bad design is invoked to compare with. In markets where a consumer problem isn't solved, a new product designed to solve it will invoke the contrast and spread like wildfire even without advertisements.

Many say that lack of advertisement can kill a good product. This is true, but does not kill the essence of the above quote. What matters is not whether the product is good or bad, but the relative goodness of the product with respect to the existing ones, and the cost that consumers have to pay for that.