Thoughts from reading Elements of User Experience

Importance of clearly defined strategy Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between products that I love and products that are confusing and ineffective.  One thing I’ve noticed: The majority of great products focus on doing one thing really well.  I think this starts with a very clear and well communicated focused strategy.     

As a product owner, it can be tempting to try to do much, especially since most people naturally assume more = better.   However as the objectives pile on, they start to to compete for each other in scope and priorities.   As a result, the more a product tries to accomplish, the harder it is to do one thing really well.  Thus the best products have very simple objectives and focus on doing that objective well.  

When I was freelancing, I had to force the product owner to commit to a specific strategy and constantly remind him to focus on the strategy when he was requesting features in the product.   It’s never fun saying no but I truly felt this was necessary to give the product any chance of success.

Power of Convention Prior to reading Elements of User Experience, I never really thought about the power of convention (i.e. doing something simply because it already exists in a different form) in products.    Learning a new system is time consuming and distracting.  As a user, if I have to learn a new system to use a product product, I’m more likely to leave for something else.   An established convention saves me from this learning curve and allows to do what I what with minimal effort.

Interestingly, Snapchat gets away with an unconventional method of changing screens.  To change screens, a user swipes left or right.  (The majority of apps require a menu or some form of navigation pane.) I bet they managed to get away with this because the core value position of the product is incredibly powerful.  More intriguingly, because the product is so popular, they have essentially established a new convention for changing tasks, which newer products can now adopt.  If a new product required a users to swipe to change screens, this would be significantly less confusing because the user now familiar with the Snapchat model.

Power of Conceptual models  I also previously never really thought about the power or prevalence  of conceptual models.  Conceptual models are features or products that are based on off real life items and systems.  (The facebook wall, the mac OS trash, gmail inbox, etc)  By relating experiences and information to real life models, products easily create an environment of familiarity for new users and avoid difficult learning curves and instructions.    I think this is one of the reasons that Dropbox has been so successful.   They strived to create an experience that is as simple as a real file sharing folder.  

These are just a few of the things that I noticed.  What do you think?