Principles of product design – how to design a successful digital product
All great products abide by design principles. Think of them as values everyone understands and champions. Lights along the winding footpath that is the design process, guiding teams to the final vision, the end-product. In this article we’re going to take a look at the above-mentioned product design principles and share with you a few tips to make the design process easier to follow.
Table of contents
Five universal product design principles
1. Always put the user first
When it comes to your product, there’s no one more important than the person who actually uses it. Whether it’s visitors to your site or users of your app, make sure that your design puts them front and center. It’s key to attracting and retaining users. And no one understands your users better than you.
Let’s take the Google homepage as an example – it’s an insanely strong example of a user-centric design. Users go to Google because they need information. The page design, then, is clean and distraction-free, with a strict focus on the search bar, so users can swiftly start finding what they need. And the results, in the main, are useful and relevant, to help them accomplish what they set out to do.
Before you begin refining an idea, always consider what are your user needs and what they wish to do. Why do they choose you? What do they want? How are they going to get it? You may already have the data to prove these. You may need to evaluate your digital prototypes. You might even want to run focus groups. All this information is critical to delivering a design that works for them.
2. Minimize user effort
One of the best product design tips is this: simplicity is key. The internet has trained us all to expect instant results. There’s a reason (source) that ‘as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%‘.
There’s a reason why all but the worst (or laziest) websites follow the same general page layout. There’s a reason why you can go from searching the Amazon app to buying a product without barely moving your thumb. You don’t even need to go through the shopping basket rigamarole thanks to the ‘Buy Now’ option.
It’s design geared to make everything effortless. And obstacles are not something to overcome but entirely avoided. After all, there are other apps to try, other sites to visit.
3. Prioritize adding value over features
As users, we all want something a bit more from our digital experiences. For that reason, one of the key principles of product design is to make ‘value’ the goal, rather than letting users (and your team) get bogged down in features that don’t add to that experience. In the creative space, it’s easy to want to go bigger, bolder, brighter – so it becomes about balancing those with what really matters. If it takes away from what you want users to achieve, strip it away. ‘Kill all your darlings’, as the author William Faulkner famously put it.
Let’s go back to that Google homepage. On the page, users are focused on the core functionality: the search bar. They can access Google services, as you’d expect. And see the whimsical Google Doodle, enhancing the brand (see, it cares!) while offering another example of what it does best – delivering global information through search algorithms. Pure value from start to finish.
Focus on adding value in your own digital product, by diverting users directly to the function or functions they want to use (and you want them to use). Reduce cognitive load – they should know where to look, not have their attention snatched by countless videos, ads, and options. They’ll appreciate their time with you so much more.
4. Use data in the decision-making process
It’s not enough to go with your gut feeling. Those sparks of genius work at the initial design stage, but at some point, the vision has to test its mettle against reality. Use data to determine your direction. It makes your user experience more valuable, and it prevents resource misdirection. There are two main types you’ll want to include quantitative and qualitative data.
Quantitative data is generally numerical, like website traffic or number of app downloads. Qualitative data is non-numerical, like characteristics and emotional responses. Picture a glass of beer. Quantitative data tells you it’s an exact pint measure. Qualitative data tells you that it’s amber and bubbly.
You can extract a lot of data from users through:
- Targeted feedback
- Surveys
- User testing
- A/B testing
- Focus groups
- Heatmaps
Bear in mind that users may not always put their opinions into the right words (source); if anything in their feedback is vague, be sure to observe not just what they say, but how they interact with your product. This will help you understand the context properly and draw the right conclusion.
By combining data from a number of sources, you can form a hypothesis that informs the continued design. If users enjoyed X, then we’ll implement Y. They bounced back at A. You remove B.
While data is important as you begin, it doesn’t stop there. At key stages during the digital product design process and well after launch, test your thinking. The results, and your users, may surprise you.
5. Put consistency and hierarchy on a pedestal
Consistency and visual hierarchy are an important design principle that plays a significant role as part of your drive to focus users’ attention. This is all about creating spaces that flow without overwhelming or confusing users.
Consistent designs bring harmony to:
- Layout
- Icons
- Font
- Color
Take Amazon, for example. Visit any product page. Then visit another. It’s ostensibly the same page with different images. This makes it much faster (even intuitive) to navigate the site and app. You always know you’re on Amazon, and you always know what to do, whether you’re searching for an ironing board or a gaming laptop or anything else. The visual hierarchy, meanwhile, is about prioritizing where users look. In other words, your main message takes precedence. This won’t necessarily be in a 1-2-3-style format. You can shift the user’s eyes across the page using images, font sizes, typography, and color. The brighter and bolder it is, the more importance it takes in the hierarchy.
By combining consistency and hierarchy, you can draw attention to the areas that matter most to your users.
How to design products – 5 product design tips
1. Keep it simple
Simplicity is the key principle of good product design. With so much competition for attention online (from competitor sites and apps to ads and pop-ups), users want a hassle-free, stress-free, jargon-free experience. When they open your app or land on your website, it should be clear what to do, where to go, and how to get the results they want. This simplicity is what helps bring people back to your product again and again.
2. Never stop testing
Testing is vital to the continued success of your product. It helps you to deliver the experience users expect – and the one they desire. Your assumptions may be challenged, but that’s part of the fun in the creative process.
Where possible, run product- or UX-related surveys to gauge how users interact with your product. Consolidate these results with tests that offer deep-dive explorations of the user experience. Think one-on-one chats and live walkthroughs of your product. Used in conjunction – and deployed regularly – you’ll gain access to oh-so-important data that strongly informs the direction of your designs, prototypes, and end-product.
Through continuous user testing and refinement, you’ll be better able to build and evolve a stronger site or app. One that meets the ongoing needs of users.
3. Don’t ignore aesthetics
In modern digital product design, it’s not enough to function well. It must look good while it does it. We love visuals as much as we love storytelling. It’s how we process most of the information around us. A product’s aesthetic design stirs an emotional effect. One glance at a website tells us whether it’s ‘cool’ or ‘professional’ or ‘traditional’ or ‘futuristic’. Then, that changes how users perceive that product. And even how they use it.
The iPhone is a notable example of this. Even if it did exactly what it does now, would the device have gained the traction it did if it were an inch thick and featured bland, squared corners? Well, it certainly would have attracted a hugely different market. The aesthetic would’ve impacted take-up. Not only that, it wouldn’t have sat well within the Apple brand (because consistency matters).
4. Stay aware of business metrics & results
When studying digital product design process, it’s important to keep overall business objectives in mind. Without that, a product may look great and work well, but ultimately fail to drive conversions. It’s up to design teams to balance the needs of the company – like increasing sales or app downloads – with what works best for users.
Avoid silos. It’s easy for different departments to work towards their own goals and do what they believe is best – but it needs a cohesive vision and process to make the end-product truly valuable to the business as a whole.
Stay on top of the data here, as it’ll allow designers to see which objectives are met. When under-performance rears its head, they’ll be better equipped to make the changes necessary to meet them in the future.
5. Run competitive research
Run competitor research throughout your product’s lifetime. During the initial stages, it helps show whether there’s an appetite for your solution. Post-launch, you can continue to see where changes need to be made to make your product stand out from others.
Microsoft is a good example. Despite what you might think, Microsoft’s biggest competitor – as far as they believe – isn’t Google. It’s Amazon. Specifically, Microsoft’s cloud operations are directly competing against Amazon Web Services. Look how that informs what they do and say, how they do and say it, and how they differentiate themselves from AWS.
Consider factors such as what does your competitor do better? What user needs are competitors not meeting? It might be simple interface issues, such as the font being too small to read; it might be a massive upheaval, like a website not displaying the correct results for a product search or a user journey that’s confusing and full of friction. Analyzing these insights helps you gain an advantage over rival products. It helps you build a product that’s better than the rest. That offers what others can’t. That fulfills the user’s needs in ways your competitors couldn’t even imagine.
Principles of good product design - summary
There are a few key principles of product design that will help you create a successful digital product. Among others, you need to put your user front-and-center and seek to minimize their effort as they engage with your solution. Everything they do should be as intuitive as can be! To make that possible, learn about human behavioral patterns and apply the rules of visual hierarchy and consistency.
Finally, don’t forget that a digital product is never a finished project – people change, so does your competitor’s landscape. So, apply user and product data to drive the best decisions. Good luck with your design!
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