Behaviors across physical and digital worlds

The way we interact with the physical world and the digital world has a lot of similarities. Let me explain.

Last weekend, I had been to a book store, which had a wide collection across various categories. How did I navigate this place?

First, I went to the categories that I'm mostly interested in - psychology, business, marketing, spirituality. As I was walking through the different aisles, I picked up books to browse - those I have either heard of OR added to my Amazon wish list. Except for a few random books with an interesting title, I mostly stuck to books that I was familiar with.

I wanted to take a look at this book "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky but couldn't find it under psychology. I asked an associate working there and he brought the book from the "Science" section.

I also enquired about a few other books and also wanted to check if they are available in the used books collection. The associate answered all my questions patiently. I ended up buying the book "Behave", which had been in my wish list for a while but couldn't make the purchase decision earlier because of the font size and cost.

A few years back, I was visiting a book store in Chennai. It was a nice, cozy place with a limited collection of books. As I was browsing through the aisle, a gentleman introduced himself as someone who works at this store and would be able to recommend books to me. Without asking whether I'd be interested in such a service, he started picking books from the shelf and was showing them to me, explaining a little bit about the book, the author, etc. Without giving any time for me to process the information or peruse through the book he handed over to me, he went ahead and brought more books. After a point, the whole experience felt irritating. I left the place without buying anything.

As I thought about these two incidents, a few ideas emerged on how these translate into building meaningful experiences in the digital world.

1. There will be a set of users who need guidance and help to pick from a collection - be it books, online courses, jewelry, clothing, etc. Maybe, they are beginners or they would need some assistance in making the right choice.
2. There will be a set of users who know exactly what they want. They are capable of searching it themselves through the catalog. If they are not able to, they might ask for help. Maybe, they were looking for it in the wrong place, their search queries may be incorrect or the catalog doesn't have a robust search capability.
3. Make sense of their actions, beyond just clicks. In the physical world, this would mean - the person looking clueless in a bookstore and he is just going in circles, sometimes even looking around for help. In the digital world, this would mean - opening multiple product descriptions across various categories, scrolling randomly without getting into any specific product description, looking for FAQ/Help/Support pages.
4. If you notice a user behavior pattern that matches to users being clueless and might need some help, take proactive steps and offer suggestions. Ask for permission first. Then ask a few questions (without sounding too intrusive) to understand their intent and suggest a few options that might be relevant. Make sure to consider their budget - in terms of money, time, or effort, depending on the context.

5 lessons from Elevate app on creating an engaging product

One of the common work-related challenges that I face in my professional responsibilities (irrespective of B2B / B2C, startup/established organization, mobile app/web product etc) is how to make a product more engaging so that the adoption and retention rates are high. 

What motivates a user to try out a software product? What's required to sustain the same motivation for a longer time? As a product manager, what do I need to do to enable both? 

Over the past 6 months, I've been using this mobile app called Elevate and I'm loving it. Except for a few days, I have been maintaining a solid streak of using this app daily. What makes me come back to this app every single day? Why am I loving it? Let me try to jot down the answers to these questions from a "user" POV and capture the key lessons from a product management perspective.

I came across this app through an Instagram Sponsored Post. I don't remember the exact phrase used in the ad, but something on the lines of being a "trainer for your brain". This was the external trigger but there was already an internal trigger running in my mind. I was grappling with these questions - Why am I becoming so dependent on the calculator on my phone/laptop for silly calculations? What happened to my mental arithmetic capabilities that helped me a great deal during school and college? I shouldn't be taking my mobile phone out for simple calculations like 18*12 ! This was the first and foremost factor that motivated me to install this app in the first place. 

Though the product is extremely engaging, there is also one more solid reason why I use this app every day. My 8-year old daughter loves the app and she sits beside me while I'm playing. She encourages me to do better and whenever I get a High score, she gives me a high-five. And she reprimands me as well when I lose all my lives 🙂 Even on days when I forget to play, she reminds me and we sit together to play.

Lesson 1: External triggers will ONLY resonate IF there is already an internal trigger/push.

Every day, the free version displays 3 different games pertaining to Reading, Writing, Speaking and Math skills. And you don't get to see the 3 games upfront. When you open the app and start your training, the three games reveal themselves one after another. No two days are the same. The app provides a wide variety of games and there is an element of surprise to find out which games are part of a day's training. The app doesn't reveal all the games available to a free user in one go. As the user crosses certain milestones, new games are unlocked slowly and steadily. Each game has different music, varied sets of elements and pictorial representations, so you don't feel a sense of monotony.

Lesson 2: Provide scope for variety and surprise the user with new content. For gaming or social media apps, this is easier to accomplish, but we can still think of ways to make the experience more engaging for mundane apps as well. Why does business software need to be static and boring?

As you play the three games in a given day's training session, the app rewards you with Good Job, Great Job and Excellent Job, depending on your performance. And the visual representation of this scoring is done with the help of a hexagon. The fact that the hexagon gets completed ONLY if you get an Excellent Job is such a fascinating trigger. The need for completion/closure pushes you to play the same game until you hit the Excellent Job, thereby completing the hexagon. The visual elements typically used in similar gamified applications are a CIRCLE or a PROGRESS BAR, but for some reason, I find the use of a hexagon to be unique in this case. I don't remember the number of points I score in a given game, but if I hit the full hexagon mark, it gives me a sense of achievement.

Lesson 3: Human need for accomplishment/achievement can be such a powerful motivating factor. When deciding on the gamification strategy, it is not about the number of badges or scoring structure. The main objective should be to think through how we can get a user to experience a sense of achievement at the end of a session/workflow.

 

The app provides interesting insights into your growth across varied skills. As a person who loves interpreting charts and graphs, I do spend some time going through my Performance charts every single day. It gives me interesting comparisons of my levels relative to other Elevate users. It doesn't bombard me with too many metrics but only the most relevant ones. Though I use the app every single day, I spend a max of 15 minutes per day, which includes my training session as well as the time I look through the Performance charts. I don't like playing addictive games as they consume so much time and attention. After the Farmville experience back in 2010, I consciously stay away from gaming both on my phone and my laptop 🙂

Lesson 4: Products that require high engagement needn't necessarily take up all of a user's time. Social media apps can also be better designed so that a user can spend 10-15 min per day and yet feel motivated to come back to the app every single day. Of course, that may never be prioritized by the current social media behemoths who monetize users' data and attention.

Elevate delivers on the promise of being a trainer for my brain. I do feel a sense of improvement in my writing, reading and Math skills ever since I started using the app. I'm more conscious of the choice of words I use while writing my blog posts. I'm more accurate while doing simple mental Math calculations. I'm able to grasp the meaning and context better while reading. These are in fact the desired outcomes of any user who signs up for Elevate. It is not about the badges, scores or streak days BUT more about whether the app delivers value.

Lesson 5: As Product Managers, we tend to focus more on the metrics (DAUs, MAUs, event tracking, workflows etc) but it is more important to measure whether the user feels a sense of progress. As Kathy Sierra says, "Upgrade your user, not your product. Don't build better cameras, build better photographers"

Any Elevate fans reading this? 🙂 What do you love about this app?

Human self-control and its implications on product design

While reading Chapter 3 of the book "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman, there were multiple "aha" moments for me, when the author talks about how self-control is a tiring task for humans. Below are some of the key take-aways for me from this chapter (quoted directly from the book):

"People who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation"

"Cognitive load is one of the causes of weakened self-control"

"Self control requires attention and effort"

"All variants of voluntary effort - cognitive, emotional or physical - draw atleast partly on a shared pool of mental energy. This phenomenon is called ego depletion"

"An effort of will or self-control is tiring. Exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant"

"Effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose"

These points give us some clarity on many areas of our life - such as
why we overeat mostly at dinner time,
why we grab a chocolate after heavy mental processing work,
why we are unable to give complete attention and concentration on multiple areas requiring mental energy throughout the day etc.

There are multiple learnings for product creators and designers based on how individual self-control operates:

For a health & wellness product/app that suggests people to make healthy choices in their diet, people are more likely to comply for breakfast and lunch, as the power to exert self-control is high. So the product can ensure the recommendations for breakfast and lunch are planned as a completely healthy meal whereas it can suggest partially healthy choices for dinner when people are resistant and reluctant to exert their self-control.

For e-commerce apps, flash sale can be scheduled in the morning hours since product selection requires significant cognitive effort, given the vast amount of choices the person gets exposed to. Similar argument holds good for weekends too.

On a related note, it will be interesting to see when mobile app users take "negative actions" such as giving a bad rating, disabling notifications and uninstalling the app itself. I presume users would take up such actions in the morning - afternoon hours, when their self-control is high and wouldn't mind spending some voluntary effort in voicing their opinion.

Personalization, reducing friction, being vigilant about the relevant choices displayed (preventing the user from getting into choice paralysis) and giving utmost importance to the ONE task the user intends to perform are all ways by which product designers can help reduce the attention and effort required by the users. These become even more important in the case of habit-forming products where the product expects "unprompted user engagement".

Notes from Product Camp Bangalore 2014

Couple of weeks back, I participated in a Product Camp event in Ebay-PayPal office premises in Bangalore. It was one of the well-planned and executed events. Product Camp is an unconference where the interested speakers volunteer for a topic they want to speak about and participants vote on such topics before the event. The schedule of the event is decided just before it starts, based on popular topics and speaker availability.

The event kicked off with two inspiring keynote speeches. Piyush Shah, VP of Products at InMobi talked about how the playing ground for mobile startups is the same irrespective of geography. Couple of interesting points he shared:

"You can build and launch an app in 100+ countries on the same day"
"Fast iterations, pilots and making mistakes crucial to learn in fast paced markets like mobile"
"Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details"

The second keynote was by Ravi Gururaj, Serial Entrepreneur and Chair - Product Council, NASSCOM. What a power-packed inspiring talk!

He emphasized the elements that are crucial to building a product startup. Key take-aways from his session:
"For product startups, it is a staircase to heaven".
"VUCA world. Volatility | Uncertainty | Complexity | Ambiguity. Grow up and deal with it"
"Launching is cheap. Competition is everywhere. Discovery is impossible. Loyalty is non-existent. Scaling is hard. Winning is disproportionate"
"Purpose drives plans. Pace trumps perfection"
"User experience design, data science and product management are the careers of future"

He also talked about the diminishing gap between dreaming and doing.

The two examples he shared on innovative design were just amazing. The Chinese bridge construction on top of a bullet rail track without disturbing the train schedule is a spectacular feat. Tesla model S cars redefined innovative design.

His Q&A session was equally enriching as well. If hiring people is a challenge, he asked startup founders to be more generous - not just in terms of equity but also in accepting new ideas and giving the space for startup employees to execute. And most importantly, he stressed on the fact that you don't ALWAYS need to be a founder to run a startup. You can also work for a startup. The role of a founder is to share a powerful vision with his/her employees, customers and investors.

After the keynote sessions, the breakout sessions began with 3 tracks in parallel. I attended the talk by Pandith Jantakahalli on jobs-to-be-done framework. He talked about the basics of why this framework is relevant and the classic milkshake example, followed by how to go about implementing this framework as part of product design.

In the afternoon, Ram Narayanan, General Manager of Ebay India spoke about the key elements to focus when building a two-sided marketplace. Trust, value and selection are the building blocks of a marketplace model. There needs to be a balance between quickly on-boarding new sellers and ensuring the marketplace is not polluted by spammers.

As part of the breakout session, I presented on a topic that I am extremely passionate about - "Influence of consumer motivations and behaviors on product usage". I hope it was useful to the audience and piqued their interest in human psychology and it's relevance in product conceptualization and design. Here are my slides:

Influence of Consumer Motivations and Behaviors on Product Usage from Anuradha Sridharan

It was a great experience, interacting with many product enthusiasts and sharing / listening on topics that are relevant to today's products ecosystem.

10 Best Practices of User Onboarding

One of the challenges I had faced as a product manager in an earlier job role was to ensure that my users are actively engaging with my product/app. When I looked at the numbers, I noticed there was a tremendous dropout after the first login. There wasn't any huge marketing budgets back then and so the users who were visiting our product/app were primarily organic. After a round of data analysis as well as talking to a few users, the conclusion was that the onboarding experience wasn't so great. We went back to the drawing board and redesigned the entire onboarding experience from the ground up.

I have been reading up and researching quite a bit on the best practices of onboarding since then and I have distilled it down to the following 10 points:

(1) Issues such as time constraints, short attention span and cognitive overload make it much more important to design a smooth and intuitive onboarding experience. In case of mobile apps, it is even more imperative, given the challenges of app discovery and contextual distractions that come with a handheld device.

(2) Onboarding is a guided path to enable the users derive the benefit / get the job done using your product. Ask yourself the following questions:
    - What benefits are users expected to get?
    - Which ONE of these benefits is most important?
    - Why is it important?
    - What problem does this benefit solve?
    - What is the job that gets done due to this benefit offered?

(3) Onboarding is not a way for you to unravel all the cool features that you have built in your product. Rather, you identify the ONE core benefit your product offers to the user and showcase that benefit in a quick, easy and interesting way. I like this phrase by Laura Klein in her article on why you should stop asking your users to explore -
"People want whatever your product promises to do for them, and they want it to happen as quickly and easily as possible"

(4) Understand the context in which a user discovers your product and design your onboarding experience accordingly. The context could be based on location (office or home), device (laptop or smart phone), time of the day (afternoon or late evening) etc.

(5) Ensure the benefit can be achieved through smallest effort required from your users, which doesn't really demand either high motivation or high ability. BJ Fogg refers to this smallest effort required by the user as "baby steps".

(6) Based on data derived from the first-time interaction, design an appropriate trigger for the subsequent actions. The trigger should create sufficient interest for the user to return to your product/app.

(7) A first-time user is usually skeptical (go with this assumption always!) and doesn't have trust in a new product/app. Onboarding should help build the trust in a small scale. So asking a user to fill a long profile form or invite his/her friends as part of the first-time experience is a bad idea, unless your product depends on this information for showcasing the benefit (social apps are a slight exception in this case).

(8) Do not overwhelm the user with too much information in the first go. When I signed up for Pinterest long time back, I faced this overwhelming feeling when the home page bombarded me with pictures after signup. I never went back to the site for a while. I still am not an active Pinterest user. At the same time, if there is too little to do, the user loses interest and wouldn't want to return. Striking the right balance is important and can be understood by many techniques, primarily through A/B testing what works well with your target user base.

(9) Onboarding is not only applicable for the first-time login. Think through the stages of how your product benefits the users. Showcase the benefits in a phased manner in the user's initial stages of product usage. This can last for upto a week or even more, depending on the product context and complexity.

(10) If your product/app uses a freemium model to monetize, don't include the benefits of the premium product offering as part of the first-time onboarding flow. Let your users explore the free product for a few days (X), get comfortable with it and *really feel* the gaps which would get addressed if they upgrade to your premium offering. Identify the appropriate time frame (X) for your target audience and only then initiate a pitch for your premium product.

Hope these pointers were useful. I have found the following resources extremely helpful to get an in-depth understanding of onboarding practices.

http://insideintercom.io/strategies-for-onboarding-new-users/ => I love Intercom's blog for sharing such interesting insights on product design. This article talks about the successful strategies that other products have used, resulting in a great onboarding experience.

http://www.useronboard.com/ => This site has a very good collection of examples / tear downs on user onboarding , taking you through step by step of popular products.

Analysis of gamification principles - QuizUp

I have become quite fascinated with the theory around gamification, more so after completing the course by Prof. Kevin Werbach (Highly recommend you sign up for this course whenever it is offered next, if you want to understand gamification beyond points, badges and leader board)

It was exciting to come across an app like "QuizUp" that has applied the best practices and principles of game design and game mechanics in a fun and engaging way.


QuizUp is a basic trivia game on the mobile that challenges you on various topics ranging from Math, English grammar and spellings and even on the popular sitcom "Friends".  You pick any topic you like, start the quiz with any player in the world who is using the app (or challenge your friends from your social circle) and play the trivia which lasts for 7 rounds. Points are rewarded based on your performance in each round and the final end state. You gather points to reach different levels and the game progresses further.

What's done well?

The key challenge to such an app is to keep users engaged, not get bored easily and keep coming back for more.

In terms of time commitment from the user, the trivia quizzes are short and doesn't take too much of time to *finish* a game. In the middle of the day, whenever I feel like taking a short break, I would play a game or two, which doesn't take more than 5 minutes. So it feels like a nice and quick distraction from whatever else I was doing.

Looking at the game elements, *points* are the building blocks to reach various levels and climb up the leader board. Points are decided not only based on the correctness of your answer but also on the speed at which you get the correct answer. Sometimes, this can be a crucial factor, which ensures you are completely hooked to the game once you start. You also get instant feedback on your total points as well as points gathered in this present quiz with a breakup of various components. It gives more clarity to the player on where he has done right and what he needs to do in the next quiz. The game also nudges you to play the quiz again, by displaying the points required to reach the next level.

The basic principle to get a player to play any game is that the game should neither feel too easy nor too hard. The game should capitalize on the "achievement" factor which can be fun to many people. In the gamification course, Prof.Werbach lists down 14 attributes that players claim to be "fun". I would say QuizUp scores well in 7 of these attributes.

1. Winning
2. Problem solving
3. Exploring
4. Chilling
5. Teamwork (collaborating with others)
6. Recognition
7. Triumphing (crushing an opponent)
8. Collecting
9. Surprise
10. Imagination
11. Sharing (being altruistic)
12. Role playing
13. Customization
14. Goofing off

QuizUp also leverages the human trait to "complete" a task. Because of the need for a shorter time commitment, the time pressure to get the answer right and complete focus on just "one" question at a time, the game tends to hook you once the quiz starts. I would presume that the drop-off rates in the middle of a quiz would be quite low.

Where can it be improved?

Game progression is an important requirement for any gamified system. Without progression, monotony sets in and chances of drop off are high. QuizUp does get tougher as you progress into the category. You need more points to reach higher levels. However the quality of the trivia in itself doesn't seem to change much. For instance, I'm in level 21 of "Spellings" category and I get a simple spelling like "keyboard". It doesn't seem to challenge me and I have lost the initial enthusiasm I had. One of the key aspects of an engaging game is that the player has to feel a sense of mastery towards the task. If I'm able to crack harder spelling quizzes, I would feel a sense of pride and achievement.

As I mentioned earlier, levels get progressively tougher as the game requires you to gather more points to level up. It does get boring after a while as you are stuck in the same level and had to gather more points to go up.

*Badges*, though present are somewhat given lower prominence and is hidden inside the navigation drawers. I wasn't quite clear on their meanings and the progress bar. I presume the team is still working on implementing a "Collections" element which will entice the player to collect all badges.

The game is presently more driven by *intrinsic* motivation where a player wants to cross different levels and feel a sense of achievement. Only when a substantial social circle is developed for a player, the game will be able to leverage the pull through *extrinsic* motivation in the form of challenges and friends leader board.

The game can also provide ability to play group trivia that encourages cooperation and collaboration (Challenging an opponent is fun but collaborating/partnering together can be interesting too)

Though they display a leaderboard for various groups under friends, country and global, I'm not so bothered about it. I personally feel that a leader board makes sense ONLY if you are in the top 10. For the rest of the players, it's better if it's not even displayed in the first place.

Please do share if you have come across other web products/apps that have implemented the principles of gamification really well.

Jobs-to-be-done framework in product design

As discussed in my last post, customers try to satisfy their needs by going after specific goals. They evaluate a product/service to see if it helps them achieve these goals. The evaluation criteria is based on multiple factors but the bottom line is to conclude whether the product helps to achieve their goal or not.

When I came across the jobs-to-be-done framework by Professor.Clayton Christensen and the famous milkshake example, it felt like an "aha" moment. The key learning is that people choose to "hire" a product or service to do a job.

Couple of his lines that made a lot of sense to me:

"marketer's task is to understand the job the customer wants to get done, and design products and brands that fill that need."

He also emphasizes that every job has a social, functional and emotional dimension to it and that's where a marketer's focus should be.

"the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy."

Though the reference point is from a marketer's perspective, this framework is equally relevant and applicable to product design.

As part of the product conceptualization process, many tech startups have started to imbibe the "jobs-to-be-done" concept as a replacement to user stories.

A user story is typically written in the form -
"As a [type of user], I want [some action], so that [outcome]"
whereas a job story is written in the form -
"When _____ , I want to _____ , so I can _____ ."

The key distinction here is that user story focuses primarily on the end outcome expected out of an action whereas a job story focuses more on the context and causality. I came across this very detailed comparison between user story and job story in Medium a few days back. Worth a read.


 Reflecting on the same fitness example I used in my last post, the goal can be broken down into smaller jobs. For instance,

Goal => I want to lose weight

Jobs

• Whenever I'm sitting continuously for an hour, I want a reminder to get up and stretch for 5 minutes so I can be more conscious about being active
• When I'm inside a store to buy groceries, I want a list of healthy ingredients to buy so I can plan a healthy meal for the week
• When I'm meeting a friend who is also interested in fitness, I need a few good articles to discuss and plan our workout together so I can engage in interesting conversations
•  Whenever I'm enjoying a high calorie dessert, I want to know the equivalent workout to do to compensate for the calories consumed so I don't feel guilty about the dessert

The context in these 4 jobs could help the product manager / designer to understand the trigger situations as well as motivating factors.

In an interview on user onboarding, Ryan Singer from 37signals talks about how the job identification can help to create a great onboarding experience.

As he talks about product features and user motivation, he says 

"attributes do not cause you to do things. It's your situation that you're in that triggers your causality."

So a clear focus on the context can give clarity on the reasons for "why we do what we do".

The key take-aways for me from this jobs-to-be-done framework are
- Take a deep dive into the context or situation ("When" and "Where") that is applicable to a specific job
- Get a clear understanding of the reasons behind the context ("Why")
- Identify the potential issues the customers face because of the context

Build a useful product in four steps

With the amount of noise and hoards of information consumers take in everyday, it's quite a challenge to stand out and get noticed, especially in consumer markets. No amount of loud marketing or jazzy advertising will give you the reach unless your product adds some value in the life of a consumer.

Flipkart advertisements are cute but if the state of their customer service, delivery processes,  inventory and their shopping interface aren't what they are today, the ads wouldn't have much of an impact. In consumer behavior terminology, we call this as "attitude towards the ad" which inturn triggers the "attitude towards the brand". We might like the ad but the brand/product wouldn't gain much from the ad.

I would keep referring to this book again because it's one of my favorites. Marty Cagan talks about three important attributes of a product in his book "Inspired" - valuable, usable and feasible. Usefulness of a product is a factor of value and usability.

Valuable - the product adds value by solving a consumers' problem in a novel way or a better way than the available solutions and so the consumer is willing to pay a price for such value.
Usable - the consumer might find value but unless if the product/solution can be easily comprehended and understood, he might not be willing to invest his resources further - time, money or effort.

How to increase the usefulness of your product?

I would like to suggest four steps by which the usefulness of a product can be increased.

1. Focus on the "one" thing that the product is expected to perform remarkably

Recently, I started using "Workflowy", a list management application to track my to-dos/tasks. It's a simple and intuitive product that completely focuses on tracking tasks in a flow structure, similar to bullet points in a Word document.   The tasks could just be a single liner next action item (a GTD concept) or a project that involves multiple levels of subtasks. The product is so simple that it looks like an empty Word document. 

This product conveys a powerful message - Do the one thing that the user expects the product to do extremely well. Ignore the "bells and whistles".

2. Involve customers early in the product conceptualization stage

I firmly believe that any idea has to be validated with the market by talking to potential customers before taking the shape of a product. No amount of secondary research, prior domain knowledge/experience or just gut instinct will help unless you hear directly from customers. Elicit more details from customers on the specific problems you want to solve through your idea. Observe the body language, the environment where he lives, works and where he will be using your product.

I had the opportunity of going for a customer visit for a product that was in the initial conceptualization stage. Along with a business development manager, we went to different regions of New Delhi and interacted with varied groups of potential customers for a couple of days. It was a truly insightful experience, as a product manager. We were able to have casual conversations over tea, observe their work environment, take a look at their PCs and get a demo of the existing systems they use. These personal connections also come in handy while you want to get pilot customers' feedback before launching the product to the market.

A deep insight that came out during this visit was that we might develop a cutting edge product that performs brilliantly in high performance desktops and mobile but is that what customers actually use on a daily basis is something to think about. They might still be hanging onto Windows XP and Internet Explorer while the world has gone too far. Such kind of customer interactions help to unravel the ground realities.

3. Reduce feature clutter

More features doesn't translate to improved usefulness of a product. It might have a negative impact to the consumer, similar to the diminishing marginal utility concept in Economics.

We purchased a Bathla cloth dryer stand for our home a year ago. Our requirement was a bigger stand and the flexibility to move it around (wheels). The product met these requirements and so we found it to be of value while purchasing it. However for the sake of adding more features, the manufacturers have designed a complex product.

Two features that are unique in this product but totally unusable are
Adjustable hanging rods - It's quite difficult to move the rods and adjust the position. The designer of this product hasn't given a thought of where this product is going to be actually kept and used - which would be the balcony, terrace or garden. Dust accumulates near the edges, causing friction while moving the rods. As a result, the adjustability feature causes more irritation and I wish it was a normal, fixed set of rods
Socks holder - there is no way one can pin socks to the grooves provided. These grooves cannot be clipped together for them to hold socks tightly in their place.

A few years back, I was assigned the work of evaluating cloud based CRM products for my organization's sales team. One of those products was Zoho CRM, a complete CRM solution that covers lead pipeline, tracking your existing customers, exporting/importing contacts, issues tracker, dashboards etc. It was a feature-exhaustive product that satisfied most of CRM requirements. However, we found that the actual users i.e. the sales team members found the product to be extremely complex and unmanageable. When we enquired about the training costs, the quote was very high for a 2-3 day training program. Though we went ahead with the product, I'm not sure of its actual usage now.

In summary, more is not merrier.

While thinking of a new feature to be added to your product, think of these questions:

1. Does it contribute to the core value of your product?
2. Does it give you a competitive edge or competitive parity?
3. Will this add more complexity to the existing feature set, from the point of view of the user/customer? (I'm not referring to the technology/architecture related complexity here)

4. Simplify the design

One of the ten principles of good design as given by Dieter Rams is that a good design makes a product useful. Design processes and principles should strive to keep the product as simple as possible.  The first three steps if taken care of will help this step immensely.

Simple products always win the race when it comes to usefulness. Coincidentally, as I was writing this article, I came across this tweet from @vijayanands

No Problem is "solved", till its a case of last man standing. Till then, everyone has a chance to play. Remember Dropbox?
— Vijay Anand (@vijayanands) May 8, 2013

Dropbox solves a simple problem of sharing content across multiple devices and with multiple people. There were many solutions available earlier. I was using Yahoo! briefcase for a while and then tried Google docs before switching to Dropbox. The idea of creating a simple folder which is quite similar to other folders on our PC and syncing the contents automatically, without any manual intervention makes Dropbox an intuitive product. There is not much of a learning curve for any user and that's the beauty of it.

One of the underlying concepts of interaction design that I came across recently was that an interface need to behave like "magic".

"best interaction designs don’t exist: they don’t take a long time to load/respond; they don’t make users think; and they don’t give users cause for grief."

Do share your views on these 4 steps in building a useful product. I would also love to hear other relevant examples.

Role of emotions in product success

Marty Cagan in his book "Inspired: How to create products Customers love" talks about the characteristics of inspiring and successful products. Apart from the popular ones such as usability and visual appeal, one specific characteristic that struck me is the importance he has given towards human emotions and the role they play in creating a winning product.

Being a key enthusiast of marketing strategies driven based on consumer behavioral aspects, it felt like a "aha!" moment while I was reading the chapters on the role of emotion in products.

Marty says, "People buy and use products largely for emotional reasons".

It could be a positive emotion that is triggered by the product or a negative emotion that has been wiped off by the product. For example,

• Facebook users might feel friendship, love and pride by being part of their social community and being in touch with their friends
• Anyone who had to make an urgent phone call might have felt irritated if he couldn't locate a PCO/STD booth nearby. A mobile phone has helped to ease off this negative feeling.

The potential consumers of a product can be segmented based on the different emotional needs that will be addressed through the product. For example, an online travel booking portal addresses different emotional needs such as annoyance, frustration, apprehension, trust, amazement etc. Each of these emotional needs are addressed by means of various benefits offered by the product.

A mapping of such emotions and the corresponding product benefits are listed below:
Annoyance - higher product performance, usable interface, seamless booking flow
Frustration - booking from the comfort of one's home, transparency in the display of travel options available
Apprehension - secure payments, quick processing of refunds
Trust - booking receipts, confirmation calls
Amazement - discounts/cashbacks, loyalty programs

While ideating on a product, we should list down those emotions which are to be addressed. Personas can be helpful in segmenting the different emotions of potential consumers.

As part of product definition and conceptualization, we should work towards identifying how these emotions will be addressed through user experience, interaction and visual design, customer support etc. Prototype testing can be used to check if test users were able to feel such emotions (both positive emotions being triggered and negative emotions being shunned) through the product.

As humans, we are in a constant state of oscillating emotions and moods throughout the day. The various products we use / depend upon can also be a source of trigger for such emotions (ask anyone who tried to book a Tatkal train ticket through IRCTC first thing in the morning and how their day went after that experience). So it is important that product managers should focus on identifying and addressing these emotional needs during product ideation and conceptualization process.

User behavior and product design

I use a Yahoo! mail account for my personal emails and I have subscriptions to many group emails. Over the past few months, my mailbox has been overflowing with many unread emails as I tend to scroll through the list and read only the most important ones at the beginning of my day. I have unsubscribed from many group lists to keep the incoming information under control. However there are some groups in which I might get a few important messages occasionally which I do not want to miss out. So I decided to create a few filters and organize my inbox.

This is exactly THE time in the lifecycle of product-user interaction when one starts to think about filters in a mail product - when there is a bunch of unread mails and the user feels that it is getting unmanageable and wants to get organized; not when the time he/she creates a new mail account and immediately starts to create filters.

Coming back to my problem, I located the "Filter emails like this" and created a filter. So far, so good. But to my utter disbelief, I couldn't see the "run filter" or similar such option. I wondered if this feature was hidden somewhere that it wasn't evident to me. After googling for a bit, I found out that such a feature doesn't exist in Yahoo! mail. Disappointed with the lack of this feature, I dropped the effort of organizing my inbox.

This experience triggered a thought process of how one should go about integrating user behavior into the product design. Before designing a product's feature or even a minor functionality, ask yourself these questions -
1. When will my user explore this specific functionality?
2. What are the circumstances under which this particular feature will be used?
3. What is the motivation factor that will enable the user to try out this feature?

Evaluate the physical circumstances (place of usage), the psychological state of the users (positive or negative frame of mind) and the expected outcome (not only from a product point of view but also from the user's intended action).

More to follow on this topic.