Designing Products People Love
Tags: #design #technology #product development #user experience #psychology #business
Authors: Scott Hurff
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Overview
This book is for anyone who wants to create better digital products. I’ve spent years studying how great products get made, and I’m here to share the principles and processes that successful product designers use to win. It’s not about ‘failing fast’ or blindly chasing the latest trends; it’s about building products with a deep understanding of your customers, their needs, and how they actually behave. You’ll learn how to:
- Uncover customer pain points and turn them into product opportunities through ‘Sales Safari’
- Define what to build and assemble the right team to do it
- Write effective interface copy and map out user flows
- Create prototypes to test and refine your ideas quickly
- Design for different states of your interface and optimize for touch interactions
- Incorporate psychology and motion to make your product more engaging
- Gather and interpret feedback to ‘level up’ your product
- Ship your product with confidence and continue to learn and iterate
Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, a startup worker, or a member of a larger organization, this book will provide you with the tools and insights you need to create products that people will love and use again and again.
Book Outline
1. Why Products Exist
The first step in product design is understanding why a product should exist – and that’s to serve a customer. Too many products are built around ‘ego-first development’ – the idea that a product is special just because its creator thinks so. Instead, products should be rooted in observation and an understanding of customer needs.
Key concept: “The purpose of the enterprise is to create a customer.” Peter Drucker wrote those words almost 50 years ago, and they’re just as true today – products exist to serve customers. Building a successful product starts with observation: understanding your audience and their needs through deep research. This is the foundation of good product design.
2. How to Create Products People Want
Successful products are built on a foundation of understanding customer pain. Sales Safari is a method of uncovering that pain through online observation. By ‘lurking’ in online communities where your target audience congregates, you can observe their behaviors, language, and problems on their own terms.
Key concept: The Pain Matrix is a tool for visualizing and understanding customer pain. It categorizes pains by frequency (how often they occur) and intensity (how severe they are). The upper-right quadrant of the Pain Matrix represents high-frequency, high-intensity pains – the most promising areas for product development.
3. What Are We Building Here?
Once you’ve gathered research, the next step is defining what to build and who’ll build it. This involves forming a small, focused product team – ideally around six people – composed of members from design, engineering, and marketing/PR. Every team member should be familiar with the customer research, and the team should be structured to encourage open communication and debate.
Key concept: Jeff Bezos’s ‘two-pizza team’ rule states that product teams should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. This limits teams to around six people, which research shows is optimal for effective communication and decision-making. Beyond size, team composition is key: including members with diverse expertise and shared understanding of customer research is essential for effective meetings and strong product definition.
4. User Interfaces Begin with Words
Interface design begins with words, not pixels. Before jumping into visual design, map out the user flows – the step-by-step sequences of actions a user takes to complete tasks. For each screen within these flows, list out the necessary interface elements and write the actual copy. This process forces you to think about the logic of your interface and ensures you’re addressing all necessary states and data points.
Key concept: “Users do not care what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.” – Jef Raskin. This quote captures the essence of ‘interface-first’ design. Start with words and user flows before pixels. Mapping out the specific steps a user takes, screen by screen, to complete key tasks within your product will surface potential problems and force you to consider data requirements, error states, and loading conditions early on.
5. Tangible Trumps Theoretical
Prototyping is essential for creating successful products. It’s a process of creating rough but functional versions of your product to test ideas, gather feedback, and make informed decisions. Prototypes help to communicate design ideas more effectively, gain team buy-in, and ultimately lead to better products. Choose prototyping tools that fit your timeframe, target audience, and desired fidelity.
Key concept: “It’s much like a hackathon” – Pauly Ting. Prototypes are storytelling tools that help you quickly test and refine ideas. By creating rough but functional versions of your product, you can gather feedback, identify usability issues, and make key decisions faster than you would with static mockups or specs. Prototyping tools are rapidly evolving, with options ranging from simple HTML mockups to sophisticated tools like Invision, Origami, and Framer.js
6. The Mechanics of Interface Design
After prototyping, the next step is refining your interface design. The UI Stack is a model for understanding the five states of every screen: ideal, empty, partial, error, and loading. Each state should be carefully considered to ensure a smooth and intuitive user experience. Additionally, designing for thumbs – taking into account the natural arcs and reach of the human hand – is crucial for touch-based interfaces.
Key concept: The UI Stack is a framework for understanding the different states of a user interface. It includes the ideal state (what you want users to see most), the empty state (when no data exists), the error state (when things go wrong), the partial state (when data is loading or incomplete), and the loading state. Designing for these states ensures your interface is cohesive, forgiving, and human.
7. The Psychology of an Experience
The psychology of a product – how it feels to use – is just as important as its functionality. Speed and responsiveness play a huge role in user experience. Beyond speed, consider incorporating user loops, variable rewards, and a thoughtful approach to aesthetics, personality, and motion to make your product more engaging and enjoyable.
Key concept: The ‘Doherty threshold’ is the idea that people are more productive when they aren’t hindered by external delays. A response time of under 400 milliseconds for computer interactions has been shown to keep users engaged and productive. Faster products make us buy more stuff! Beyond speed, designers should consider incorporating user loops, variable rewards, aesthetics, personality, and motion to create engaging and memorable product experiences.
8. Interpreting Feedback and ‘Leveling Up’ Your Product
Building a product is an iterative process, and setbacks are inevitable. Feedback is essential for ‘leveling up’ your product. Gather critiques from your team, conduct internal beta tests, and seek feedback from carefully selected existing and potential customers. Remember to parse feedback thoughtfully and stay true to the core principles of your product vision.
Key concept: The ‘Valley of Despair’ is a feeling that all product designers experience – that moment when they think their product won’t work and nobody will use it. Pushing through this stage requires persistence, a return to the basics, and a focus on gathering and interpreting feedback from both your team and your users.
9. Shipping Is an Art - and a Science
Shipping a product is not just about getting it out the door; it’s about delivering a product that is lovable and solves real problems for your customers. Don’t focus on shipping for the sake of shipping; instead, aim for a ‘minimum lovable product’. Take ownership of everything related to your product, from design and development to marketing and customer support. Monitor customer feedback closely and continuously iterate to improve your product.
Key concept: The ‘Minimum Lovable Product’ is the lowest form of a product that is capable of being loved, accepted, and a problem solver – with the understanding that it is not flawless. Shipping a product is an art and a science. Focus on your audience’s problems, set self-imposed deadlines, and establish a clear quality threshold. Once you launch, take ownership of everything and monitor customer support closely to learn and iterate.
Essential Questions
1. Why should a product exist? What is its fundamental purpose?
Great products are born from a deep understanding of customer needs. This book advocates for a ‘customer-centric’ approach to product design, emphasizing that the purpose of a product is to solve a problem or fulfill a need for a specific audience. Hurff argues that ‘ego-first development’, where products are built based on the creator’s desires rather than customer needs, is a recipe for failure. The book provides tools and methods, like ‘Sales Safari’ and the ‘Pain Matrix’, to help designers uncover and understand customer pain points, ensuring that the product is focused on solving real problems for real people.
2. How can we identify and understand customer pain points? What methods can be used to uncover these pains?
Hurff argues that understanding customer pain is crucial to building a successful product. ‘Sales Safari’, a method of online ethnographic research, is introduced as a way to uncover these pains. It involves ‘lurking’ in online communities where your target audience congregates, observing their behavior, language, and the problems they discuss. This method helps to understand customer needs on their terms, revealing valuable insights that can inform product development. The Pain Matrix, a tool for visualizing and categorizing these pains, helps to prioritize and focus product development efforts on solving the most pressing customer issues.
3. How do you define what product to build and who should be involved in the process?
Effective product development requires assembling the right team, determining the product’s scope, and establishing a clear product vision. Hurff advocates for small, focused ‘two-pizza teams’, ideally around six people, composed of individuals from design, engineering, and marketing/PR. The emphasis is on building trust among team members, fostering open communication and constructive debate, and ensuring everyone is aligned with the product vision. This small team size allows for agile decision-making and reduces the risk of ‘design by committee’.
4. How do you design a user interface that is intuitive and effective?
Good interface design begins with words and user flows, not pixels. Hurff advocates for mapping out the user’s journey through the product, screen-by-screen, before diving into visual design. This process involves creating a step-by-step outline of actions a user takes to complete tasks. By writing out the interface copy and listing the necessary interface elements for each screen, designers can surface potential problems, identify data requirements, and consider edge cases early on. This approach leads to a more logical, streamlined, and ultimately user-friendly interface.
5. Why is prototyping essential for building successful products?
Prototyping is a powerful tool for testing, iterating, and refining ideas. It involves creating rough, functional versions of a product to get it in front of users and gather feedback. Hurff advocates for ‘rapid prototyping’, which involves focusing a limited block of time on creating a prototype to cut out fluff and tangents. Prototypes can take many forms, from simple HTML mockups to interactive animations, and the choice of tools should be driven by the project’s timeframe, target audience, and required fidelity.
Key Takeaways
1. Observe Customers in Their Natural Habitat
Instead of relying on assumptions or biased surveys, observe your target audience in their natural habitat – the internet. Dive into forums, analyze product reviews, and study how they communicate. This approach, termed ‘Sales Safari,’ helps uncover genuine customer pain points and desires, providing a solid foundation for product development.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer could use ‘Sales Safari’ to observe how users interact with existing AI-powered tools or discuss their experiences with AI in online forums. The insights gathered could inform the design and functionality of new AI products, ensuring they address real user needs and pain points.
2. Embrace Small, Focused Product Teams
Large teams can become bogged down by communication overhead and conflicting opinions. Hurff highlights Jeff Bezos’s ‘two-pizza team’ rule, advocating for product teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas (around six people). This promotes efficient collaboration, faster decision-making, and a stronger sense of ownership.
Practical Application:
When designing a new AI-powered feature, involve a team of no more than six people, including AI engineers, product designers, and potentially a user researcher familiar with the target audience. This ensures efficient communication, faster decision-making, and a shared understanding of the problem being solved.
3. Prioritize Interface Copy and User Flows Before Visual Design
Don’t get caught up in pixels too early. Start with words. Outline the user’s journey through your product by writing out the interface copy and mapping the flow of screens. This forces clarity of thought, surfaces potential usability problems, and helps identify data requirements before visual design begins.
Practical Application:
Before building an AI-powered chatbot, focus on crafting the dialog flow and writing the conversational script. Test and iterate on the dialog with users before investing in complex natural language processing models or visual interfaces. This ensures the chatbot’s core functionality – its ability to understand and respond to user needs – is solid before adding layers of complexity.
4. Design for Thumbs
Mobile devices have changed the way we interact with technology. Hurff stresses the importance of designing for thumbs, placing key actions and controls within easy reach of the user’s thumb. This requires understanding how people grip and use their devices, and adapting layouts accordingly to ensure a comfortable and effortless experience.
Practical Application:
When designing a user interface for an AI-powered product, consider the different ways users might hold and interact with their devices. For mobile interfaces, ensure key actions are easily accessible within the ‘Thumb Zone’ – the area of the screen easily reachable by the thumb. For desktop interfaces, consider incorporating keyboard shortcuts and optimizing for mouse interactions.
5. Manage the Perception of Speed
While speed is crucial, the perception of speed is equally important. Instead of relying on generic loading spinners, consider using ‘skeleton screens’ – placeholders that gradually populate with content as it loads. This technique gives the user a sense of progress and makes the wait time feel shorter.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer could incorporate a progress bar that visually fills up as an AI model is being trained. This shifts the focus from the duration of the process to the visual representation of progress being made, making the wait time feel shorter and less frustrating for the user.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Find Product Ideas with Sales Safari
This chapter introduces the ‘Sales Safari’ method for uncovering customer pain points, which is particularly relevant for AI product engineers. It provides a step-by-step process for conducting online ethnographic research, analyzing customer conversations, and using those insights to inform product development.
Memorable Quotes
Products Are for Customers. 6
“The purpose of the enterprise is to create a customer.”
Find Product Ideas with Sales Safari. 54
“You wouldn’t make a judgment call about what MOST lions do based on a lion in a zoo, because MOST lions aren’t in zoos.”
Really? Start with Words?. 97
“Users do not care what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.”
Bigger Than a Buzzword. 132
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.
Error state. 178
“The first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.”
Comparative Analysis
Designing Products People Love stands out for its emphasis on the history and evolution of product design, tracing its roots to fields like industrial design and marketing. Unlike books that focus solely on contemporary digital design practices, Hurff’s work provides a broader context, showing how timeless principles of observation, empathy, and iteration have shaped iconic products across different eras. The book aligns with the ‘Jobs to be Done’ framework by emphasizing a deep understanding of customer needs, but it goes further by providing practical methodologies like ‘Sales Safari’ and the ‘Pain Matrix’ to unearth those needs. While Hurff acknowledges the importance of lean and agile methodologies, he cautions against the pitfalls of ‘ego-first development’ and ‘shipping for the sake of shipping,’ advocating instead for a focus on building ‘minimum lovable products.’ This resonates with the principles of user-centered design espoused by authors like Don Norman but offers a more practical and actionable approach grounded in real-world examples.
Reflection
Designing Products People Love offers a compelling blend of historical context, practical methodologies, and psychological insights, making it a valuable resource for anyone involved in product development, particularly those in AI. While the book primarily focuses on digital product design, its core principles of observation, empathy, and iteration are universally applicable. Hurff’s emphasis on understanding customer pain points and building ‘minimum lovable products’ resonates strongly with the challenges of designing AI products that are not only functional but also user-friendly and trustworthy. The book’s strength lies in its clear, actionable advice and real-world examples, making it a practical guide for navigating the complexities of product development. However, one could argue that the book places less emphasis on the technical aspects of product design, which could be particularly relevant for AI product engineers. Additionally, the rapid evolution of technology, especially in AI, means that some of the specific tools and techniques mentioned might become outdated quickly. Nonetheless, the book’s core principles remain timeless and provide a solid foundation for building great products, regardless of the technological landscape.
Flashcards
What is Sales Safari?
A method for uncovering customer pain points through online observation.
What is the Pain Matrix?
A tool for visualizing and categorizing customer pain points based on frequency and intensity.
What is the ‘two-pizza team’ rule?
Small, focused product teams of around six people, ideal for effective communication and decision-making.
What is ‘interface-first’ design?
A design process that starts with words and user flows before pixels.
What are prototypes?
Rough, functional versions of a product, used to test ideas, gather feedback, and make decisions.
What are the five states of the UI Stack?
Ideal, empty, partial, error, and loading.
What is the ‘Valley of Despair’?
The point in product development where designers feel like their product won’t work.
What is a ‘minimum lovable product’?
The lowest form of a product that is capable of being loved, accepted, and solves a problem.