The problem is there are simply too many angles to assess when deciding on a product’s feature set. Some of those angles include the messiness we call human emotions which have a tendency to be fickle and be influenced by social forces we only notice after it’s too late.

Why does it require magic? Because magic is what it takes to predict the future and innovate after you’ve done everything humanly possible to understand the issues. The magic comes from a team or individual who has a vision—who can immerse themselves in the issues, fly above them for a bird’s eye view and come out the other side with the “right” solution.

Having a vision is a special and rare talent that just because you’ve earned a Harvard MBA doesn’t qualify you to possess it. It’s why we celebrate people like Steve Jobs and his accomplishments. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook (perhaps, a little by accident) but it’s Jobs who hits it out of the park over and over again and it’s only Jobs who has enough credibility to call his latest creation the “post-PC device.”

Many CEOs of startups already sense and envy this magic. Where they get in trouble is when they naively believe all it takes is gut instinct to arrive at the right product. They skip the homework and go right to the exam, failing terribly. Not only do they lose by not understanding their customers, but they may not possess that special ability which allows some to make keen observations, feel empathy for their users and stitch together conventional elements to invent something different and delightful.

So, arriving at the right set of features for a product is a combination of both process and magic where one is a tool for learning and the other for predicting a future state. Fortunately for us, the first part is something that can be learned and put into practice. The other one involves genius and maybe more luck than we’d like to admit. (After all, who could have guessed that a micro-blogging tool with a 140 character limit would be such a hit.)

The following covers the part we can learn and outlines a method for arriving at an initial set of product features that can then be designed and tested for perceived value. Each phase builds from the previous one and while it may seem like a lot and take a few days to get through, it’s a necessary process for approaching the problem at many angles. To complicate things further, every product and situation is unique but by covering a multi-vector research plan (looking at customers, trends, technology, competition, etc.) we begin to strategically narrow down the list of possible features for our product and find room for innovation.

Immersion

Before we can begin to talk about our product’s feature set, we need to envelop ourselves in what we’re about to examine. An immersion phase provides the knowledge foundation for making educated guesses that we can then test, revise or throw out. Immersion give us insight into what the issues are in the first place and exposes the different angles to the problem. As you can imagine, skipping this important phase is just like showing up to the exam without studying. Do your homework!

According to Adam Richardson, creative director at Frog, immersion brings together a multitude of factors:

• Competitors (direct and adjacent)
• Comparative companies and products who can provide useful lessons
• Your company’s own business, capabilities, brand and values
• Broad cultural and economic trends
• Technology enablers available internally and externally

It may be added that the tools for arriving at these factors include:

• Competitive and comparative analysis
• Surveys
• Customer/partner interviews
• Ethnographic studies
• Persona creation
• Scenario/task exploration
• Usability testing (current product or competitors’ products)
• Researching new and available technology

A competitive/comparative analysis helps us understand where there’s room for differentiation, what conventions already exist, and what available technology there is. While our user research and documentation helps us understand who we’re selecting the features for and in what context they may be used.

Setting Product Goals

Once we’ve set up our knowledge base we take a day or two to educate all the stakeholders and next, begin the ideation phase. But before we dive into a brainstorm session we need to discuss and list the goals surrounding the product. This will help us not waste time on ideas or concepts that are not in the current interest of the business.

Some examples of project goals include:

Business Goals
e.g. drive foot traffic to locations, educate, register users

Product Goals
e.g. longer user engagement time, provide online support, ease of use

User Goals
These typically come from the created personas which in turn, come from research

Short-Term Goals
e.g. launch for upcoming event, register users, mobile presence

Long-Term Goals
e.g. make money, launch enterprise version, charge for business services

Non-Goals
e.g. maximize revenue, provide full-featured app, satisfy all customer types

Ideation

To begin the ideation phase, we place on a wall or whiteboard four labels. A moderator will use sticky notes to write down any proposed features and place it under a label. Some areas will already be filled with product feature ideas gathered from our Immersion Phase (i.e. business requirements, user goals, features most competitors already have, etc.)

The four designated areas act as catalysts for product feature brainstorming and put both the “known” (gathered from research) and “unknown” (future-predicting innovation) side by side.

The objective isn’t to restrict ideation to confined containers, but to ensure we’re considering all the major product angles. To keep the session free-flowing, ideas may be duplicated under one or more areas and/or combined. Using sticky notes makes it easy to swap ideas from one category to another. Participants then add to the existing pre-populated ideas and debate and discuss additional ways to innovate.

The four areas include:

Features based on business requirements
This area includes pre-populated features (sticky notes) based on stakeholder interviews from the immersion phase. However, additional requirements may be added as the product discussion widens. This typically includes features like user registration, optimization, login, etc.

Features based on best practices
Includes pre-populated features based on competitive and comparative analysis. Features may include the ability to upload images, search, offline support, sync between multiple devices, etc.

Features based on user goals
Includes pre-populated features based on customer research and personas. This essentially shows what users are wishing for but also leaves room for brainstorming unmet user/customer needs and desires.

Features based on innovation
This is the only area without any pre-populated feature ideas. The previous three areas help ensure we’re covering the essentials. The ideas generated for the innovation area come from discussion surrounding competitive differentiation, market opportunity and emerging technologies and typically make room for any ‘blue sky’ thinking.

To capture what was gained from the brainstorm session, pictures are taken of the whiteboard display, summarized in a document and shared among participants.

Narrowing the Feature Set

Brainstorm sessions are for idea generation, not for deciding feature sets. This is sometimes difficult to communicate to impatient CEOs who wish to walk out of a four-hour brainstorm session with a fixed feature set they can hand off to their engineers. One of the objectives of a brainstorm session is to shoot for quantity and so it’s the nature of these sessions to produce more ideas than you need. For that reason, we need a process for narrowing the number of ideas or run the risk of feature bloat (producing a product with too many features). All experienced product managers know the problems associated with feature bloat:

• Unrealistic product schedules that stress team members
• A focus on quantity over quality of experience
• A user experience made cumbersome and complex by too many options
• The burden of providing support for every new feature
• Wasting resources, time and money

In an effort to provide an elegant solution for your users and customers, you need to decide which features really provide value to them. And for first version launches, it’s best to plan for a minimal viable product. That is, the balance point where a product fulfills the necessary user goals with the least amount of features.

This is where you begin to ask questions like “Is it important we provide offline support out of the gate?” or “Is a chat widget something our users can live without?”. An MVP is a good, lean strategy that allows a startup or company to safely maintain costs while they confirm interest in their product.

In addition to thinking about an MVP, a checklist helps to narrow the feature list and cut some of the fat. Every feature idea should be examined by asking:

• Does the feature solve a problem?
• Is the feature feasible? In other words, can it be technically done now (not 5 years from now)?
• Would the feature create more value for the customer or is it driven by selfish interests (e.g., using technology as an end rather than a means)?
• Can it be done within certain amount of time?
• Are there the resources?
• What’s the risk of not completing it in time?

After putting your ideas through this rigor, it’s good to ask which ideas we should pursue immediately and which can can be deferred for later.

Often times, brainstorm sessions result in some brilliant ideas ahead of their time. Don’t throw these out! Save them for when the timing is right. For example, it took over 10 years for Wi-Fi to catch on with the public. In 2000, some of us had only one device connected to our home Wi-Fi. Now we have multiple devices that include everything from printers to cameras. Wi-Fi is now considered a standard feature with most electronic devices. Was 2000 a good time to introduce a Wi-Fi printer? Probably not, not enough people had Wi-Fi set up in their home yet. The point is providing a printer with Wi-Fi was a good idea, just not back in 2000.

Now that we’ve narrowed our feature scope based on business goals, knowledge and perceived customer value, we have a starting point for beginning to build a prototype. With the prototype we will layout the features to see if they make sense within the user flow and then, test the prototype to see if the features make sense to our users and customers. From there it’s an iterative cycle of design-test-refine until we have some certainty that the features we’ve chosen are the right ones.

The Magic

“Where does the magic come in?” you might be asking. The magic comes in deciding which features have the potential to be innovative. Innovation is the introduction of an invention to the broader public that improves the current state or condition of something. Just because you’ve launched a feature that nobody has doesn’t mean it’s innovative—it must be adopted by the public first! That’s why focusing on the right features is so important. Miss an upcoming trend or market insight and you could be toast. The visionary is the one who can take in all the information and predict the next thing—not because everyone says so, but because they see it coming from a mile away. That takes talent, not a learned process.

May you have both process and talent!

And yet, business is often times strangely at odds with exploring the emotional side of things. The authors of the book, Do you matter? How great design will make people love your company couldn’t have stated it better when they said, “We’d prefer to rationalize, measure, process, and systematize. Ironically, we tend to put faith in things that are decidedly not humanistic: Science. Math. Machines. When the going gets gray, we sprint for black or white.”

Empathy may be defined as having an awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns. It might be said that empathy requires a certain level of emotional intelligence in order to be sensitive to how customers and users might experience a wide range of emotions at a certain place and time. In the world of business and design, the ability to acutely recognize areas of pleasure or friction could be the difference between a successful product and a bomb.

We are ‘sentient’ beings (from Latin ‘sentient’, meaning feeling). We feel first and then, try to make sense of things after. IBM salesperson, F.G. “Buck” Rogers once said, “Customers buy on emotion and then justify with logic.” We attach a feeling to everything that reaches our senses. Everything in our area of focus is constantly being judged, compared and labeled.

There are many reason for this, one of them being that emotions (however much trouble they bring us) help guide us through life. How many times have we made a decision based on “our gut”. We don’t need to stop and analyze a dark alley to know instantly that danger might be ahead. We feel it and make a decision based on what our internal message is.

Emotions provide us with a shortcut to rapid understanding, a way to quickly size-up a situation and cut through the noise. It’s no wonder we use the same cerebral function to quickly size-up whether or not a recommended web service is trustworthy, safe and not a waste of our time.

I once had a client who brought me in to help them increase their conversion rate for a sign-up process. Their was a rumor that the competition with a similar flow, had a much better conversion rate and every effort would be needed to beat them.

Before the kick-off meeting, I planted myself at a local Starbucks to study the existing user flow and hopefully, have something intelligent to say for our fist meeting. At first glance, everything about the existing UI seemed to function well. All the heuristics were in place: the steps were clearly laid out, the form elements were intuitive, there was error prevention, the pages were aesthetically pleasing without clutter… From a UI standpoint, it was complete.

After briefly panicking about how I was supposed to improve the flow, I remembered the designer’s most valuable tool — empathy. I put on my Luke Skywalker persona, let go and just felt it.

Sure, the mechanics of the user flow were in tact, but what about the emotional elements? What was going through people’s heads as they followed the process? I pretended to go through the sign-up process as if it were my first time, mindfully noting all the different emotions I encountered along the way like a Buddhist practitioner in deep meditation.

To my surprise, I was able to quickly jot down about a dozen negative reactions to the existing user flow and possible solutions. These “first impressions” were so valuable that we ended up referring to them several times during the span of the project. I was exploring the emotional territory of the experience identifying areas of mistrust, confusion, impatience, uncertainty, inauthenticity and deeper qualities that touched on the brand identity and its need to elicit desire and show human connection. The result of putting myself in the user’s shoes and grading the experience on an emotional level, was a product requirements checklist that we could then use to test our assumptions and make recommendations.

As a designer, I consider the ability to empathize my greatest tool. By focusing on the emotional quality,  the designer is able to get at the core of what makes good design. According to Dev Patnaik, author of Wired to Care, empathy is an “antidote to a world of abstraction.” Empathy allows us to boil things down and pursue what matters most to our users and customers. The question to our customers shouldn’t be “So, how did it work? It’s “How did it make you feel?”

There are many reasons why businesses may not like using emotions as a path to designing and building better products and services. After all, the reason why humans are so fickle and unpredictable in the first place is because of emotions and our inability to manage them. Emotions are messy. Management may claim that it’s all subjective anyway — “Is the glass half full, or half empty?” What good are using emotions if everybody has a different opinion?

Decisions based on how somebody feels is a tough sell. If you want to get eaten for lunch by a pool of sharks, try telling a board of directors that from now on your strategy will be based on the emotional quality of your target audience.

And yet, according to Kevin Clark, Program Director at IBM and Ron Smith, Designer and Brand Experience Strategist at IBM, understanding the emotional aspect of offering appeal and transactions to their customers “is pivotal to business success” and business strategy.

Patnaik states, “Companies prosper when they tap into a power that every one of us already had — the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with people.” And brand guru, Marty Neumeier adds, “While this trait may have been a handicap in the days of win-lose customer relationships, in today’s customer-centric marketplace, it’s invaluable.”

In today’s customer-centric marketplace, we also have Facebook and Twitter which means any customer satisfaction or discontent travels fast! Better to know what your customers are feeling before, rather than later.

Besides making a good case for why the emotional quality of a product or service is important, there are ways to test your customer’s responses and your own intuition. Traditional qualitative research and usability testing provides support and a methodology for taking the fuzzy math of feelings and making sense out of it.

Learning how people feel about something isn’t the same as whether they like it. Surveys often reveal likes and dislikes, but it’s ethnography studies and live usability testing that often show the thinking process that follows an experience. Ethnographic field studies might reveal how users are approaching a problem with a workaround that could be better designed and exploited. Usability testing requires the participant to think out loud, often times revealing their sincere feelings about an experience.

With an empathic design methodology, we embrace the human condition or as customer development author Steve Blank likes to say, “We get out of the building.” We learn through direct observation and test our assumptions about what customers and users are feeling. We get out, connect and interact with customers versus designing within our four walls, believing we already know everything our audience wants (that’s OK for Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, probably not for you).

Like a sociologist or anthropologist, we back our findings with documented test results that measure consistent occurrences. Designers will develop tools such as personas to focus the team on key audience characteristics, behaviors and attitudes. New ideas based on brainstorm sessions and customer research are folded into a prototype, tested and refined.

By these methods, designing based on something abstract is less of a slippery slope and is done in a way that is acceptable within a business environment. Empathy and the emotional quality of your product or service provides meaning and value.

In summary, being emotionally receptive to your customers and product experience is fundamental to success. Experiences and brands live in the minds and hearts of individuals where they are archived in the abstract and sometimes messy form of emotions. As it turns out, great design is more than just sophisticated interaction and beautiful aesthetics.

“But to be great at design, you need to embrace the human condition and recognize that when it’s all said and done, this is what will you serve you the best.” – Brunner, Emery and Hall

I just wanted to take a moment to sincerely let you know how much I appreciate you always trying to please me (and I know I’m not always easy) and to also share with you some areas where we might need some help. You knew from day 1 that I was “high-maintenance” (as you always like to tell your friends), so please don’t be offended by what I’m about to say.

I want to love you, I really do, but sometimes you make it very hard. First, you say you’ve put a lot of energy into it. Well, I don’t really care how much blood, sweat and tears it has cost you. You like to call it “visits” or “page views” or “registered users”. I call it a relationship. Why don’t you see it the same way I do?

When I first met you, I gave you more than 10 seconds to show me why I might want to download your app. At that time, you were free and that’s what attracted me to you. But now you tell me I’ve gotta pay and I’m pissed! How can you twist my arm like this? You give me no options or incentives and now I feel cheated and taken advantage of. Why don’t you ever ask me what I think before making these kinds of decisions? Hello! Customer survey anyone?

Sure, you put your spin on it and try to make everything sound nice and enchanting, but I don’t like your spin. Call off your marketing dogs already. I’ve been marketed to since the day I was born and can sniff-out a liar a mile away. Please don’t lie to me or try to hype things that are just not so.

I told you, “Please don’t make me learn your app. Do you know how busy I am?” You thought it was funny how I always need your support. What support? You make it impossible to get the right answers or contact you when I really need it. I’m not stupid, baby, just very busy. Don’t waste my time.

You like to be social but your bla, bla, bla and “there’s me on Facebook” and “there’s me on Twitter” doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t listen to what I have to say in return. Social is a two-way conversation, get it?!?

And why do you make me connect through Facebook? I like Facebook, but only for certain things. Please don’t make me connect through my social network and friends. Don’t abuse me and my friends, we know what you’re up to.

Mostly, you say you want me but all you care about is your bottom line. I can tell and I’m thinking about going somewhere else. No matter how true it may be, it’s always a turn off to see that your needs come before my own. It really makes me sad that I don’t matter to you the most.

OK, so maybe it’s true about what they say about me being unfaithful and “always looking for the next best thing.” Whatever. Make me truly love you and maybe I’ll stick around and show you how much patience I have for your quirkiness.

Which leads me to say, If you make a mistake, just admit it. I don’t hold grudges, really. Just don’t forget to admit it or hell you’ll pay.

Be always honest with me and I’ll show understanding and patience. Lie to me or put too much spin on it and I’ll throw it right back at you 10-fold.

You want to see PR? I’m a hundred times more effective that your “award-winning PR agency”. Make me love you and I’ll broadcast it to the four winds (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn). Piss me off and I’ll spread the bad news like wild fire.

Honestly, I’m compassionate and am not looking for the perfect you, just frequent upgrades. I LOVE FREE UPGRADES! They make me feel like you care and that you’re listening. Upgrades are like little gifts.

Which brings me to how I’ll permit that you spoil me:

I like it when you anticipate my every need and don’t make me think. I like it when you’re polite. I like the small things like free shipping both ways and no taxes. I like it when you pleasantly surprise me with ways that make my life easier and less complicated. I like it when you’re flexible, open and not jealous of others. I like it that you’re everywhere I need you to be.

So, my only question to you is this: HOW WILL YOU MAKE ME HAPPY TODAY?

Forever yours (or not),
Your User Base

The method for building successful products should never, as product guru Marty Cagan likes to explain it, feel like playing darts blindfolded. With companies like IDEO, Cooper, Adaptive Path and 37 Signals sharing their industry secrets, there’s really no excuse anymore for building products haphazardly. It’s my hope the following will help, in some small way, to guide early startups on the right path to creating the next killer app.

Engineers Designer Wanted
10 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for engineers to both design and build an application. “Graphic designers” were just starting to get their heads around the digital space and for the most part, products were designed and built from start to finish by engineers. While many products “functioned” correctly, often the result was a user experience that lacked empathy for the user (a design skill) and a frustrating process where everyone from product manager to CEO was at the mercy of the engineer’s discretion.

Flash forward to 2010 and what we find are designers doing a lot of the up-front work in order to ensure the usability and perceived value of a digital product. More than anything, what designers bring to a project at the beginning is insurance that what you’re about to build will be successful. How do they do this? They apply design thinking:

• Take risks at the early stages when there’s room for error
• Conduct research to understand the target audience’s goals, behaviors and attitudes
• Test ideas to gather immediate feedback and make any course changes early
• Challenge a product or service’s usability, feasibility and perceived value

All this begins before one line of code is ever typed. Rather than hiring a bunch of engineers to start building from the get-go, the focus is on product discovery via a high-fidelity prototype (HTML with light scripting or Flash) that mimics the user experience. Like building a house, the first step isn’t to begin pouring the foundation, but to work with the architects to create a plan and test the design (with a prototype) before the construction team shows up.

Start out with a good product manager and designer and consult the rest. Between your product manager and designer, you should be able to get your vision off and running, keep costs down and hopes up.

Fail quickly and early (and cheaply)
One of the design thinker’s mantras is “fail quickly and early.” That’s right, go ahead and fail—just do it while it’s cheap and easy to do so.

Prototypes, both low-fidelity and high-fidelity, are a great way to safely test out ideas early in the process. Have a whacky idea that might just be the next Twitter? Test it. Had a heated argument about the validity of a certain feature? Test it.

With interactive prototyping tools like Axure and the soon-to-be-launched Adobe Flash Catalyst, you can put together a wireframe prototype in no time in order to test your vision. And if your idea turns out to be a complete flop? Well…better now than later when it could cost you weeks of code or sending an apology letter to your user base.

Feasible, usable, valuable
So, you have a prototype that matches your vision perfectly and (in your mind) appears to be a Facebook killer. Now’s the time to be asking yourself the following:

Is the product feasible? Somebody grab the technologist because we need find out if what we’re proposing is even technologically possible or if we are light years away. Bringing a technologist into the equation early has both its advantages and disadvantages. In this case, it’s important to understand now, whether or not your concept has wings. A good technologist will also provide insight into what else is possible (i.e., “Did you know we could…”).

On the other hand, some technologists may have a narrow view of what’s possible and you can run the risk of killing innovation. The initial iPad feedback coming from the tech community is an example where technologists don’t see the value in what could be a game-changer for the industry. A good strategy in the early stages is to “shoot for the moon”, drafting plans that are creative and uninhibited by barriers (within reason, of course).

Is the product usable? You “get it,” but will your users? Designers like to use fancy words like heuristic evaluation to describe testing the usability of a product. Some quick heuristics to test are: user control and freedom, consistency, error prevention, efficiency and aesthetics. Again, a prototype along with direct observation of test participants are used to grade the usability of a product.

Is the product valuable? What is the perceived value of the product in the eyes of the user/customer? In other words, will anyone care? An invention only becomes an innovation once others recognize the value of it. Does the world need another Facebook or My Space?…probably not.

I (heart) users
Everyone knows the key to success is building a product people love. Steve Jobs likes to reminds us of this. Are Apple products more expensive that their competitors’? Sure, but it doesn’t matter. We still buy them.

According to the book The Design of Sites, there are four types of design styles. The first is company-centered design where the priorities of the company are put before those of the user. In return, little thought is given to what customers want to do. An example of this is making users register before giving them access to an application’s features.

The second style is technology-centered design. Here, technology is an end rather than a means of accomplishing and end. Just because you can build it, doesn’t mean you should or that anyone will want it.

Thirdly, there’s design-centered design. In design-centered design, “the needs of other people are given less importance than the creative and expressive needs of the design team.” An example is the designer who is only concerned with the emotional impact of the user experience and ignores other key elements such as usability.

Lastly, there’s customer-centered design. This is the sweet spot that “emphasizes customers and their tasks above all, and sees technology as a tool that can empower people.” While it’s important to meet business goals, it’s equally as important to show empathy for the user by deeply understanding their needs, behaviors and attitudes. Lose site of the user and you’re lost. In any case, if you build a product people love, many of your business requirements will already have been met.

Test it, test it, test it

Test it at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. A common misconception is testing wastes a lot of time and money. In the hay day when focus groups were lead by over-inflated marketing agencies, it did. Welcome to the 21st century. Usability testing can now be done in a variety of ways that are both relatively cheap and fast. Sites like UserTesting.com allow for quick turn-arounds and for about $50 a user, you can hire live participants to try out your product at your work place and gather insights. A morning of usability testing at about $150 (3 participants) is time and money well-spent assuring your team they’re on the right track. Learn to enjoy testing and do it frequently. Not only will you find it a nice distraction from looking at documentation and mockups all day, but it could save you a lot of money and everyone headaches along the way.

Build a minimal product
“Build half a product, not a half-ass product” – 37 Signals

Start by building a minimum product to ensure you can get something out sooner rather than later. Build a good foundation and add later as your product gains traction with your users. Many times I’ve witnessed what could’ve been a very nice product launch, turn into something that only the business owners thought was a success. The feeling is “We’ve worked very hard on this and we deserve to feel proud about it.” Unfortunately, your users could care less how many hours you’ve put into it. That’s why it’s important to plan well and bite off only as much you can chew.

“Perfection” is a word people don’t like to use in product meetings. It’s time to bring the perfectionists back with the caveat that the team work on less rather than more in order to achieve both a product that is elegant and do-able by the product team. In the long-run, you’re users will thank you with rave reviews and you can return the favor with frequent updates as you check-off one new feature after another.

Feedback comes in many flavors
While usability testing and free beta versions provide invaluable feedback to your product team, so does social media. Companies now have a variety of ways to gather feedback from their customers, whether it be comments to their blog posts, Twitter feed or Facebook page. Jump on the social media bandwagon early to pick up on the vibe from your users and get people’s reactions to your product early. Consider social media your focus group.

Common pitfalls
As mentioned at the beginning of the post, startups are often lead by people that might not have a lot of experience when it comes to product development. An MBA might buy you business credentials but that doesn’t necessarily equate to being a great product designer. Here are some areas entrepreneurs often get stuck:

“We’ll see what sticks”
The mindset is to throw several concepts at the wall like spaghetti and see what sticks with your users/customers. This brings us back to the throwing-darts analogy. The idea is to test all concepts before they reach your audience. Not only will this save you time and a wad of cash, but it will help maintain a fickle user base while you experiment with other ideas. “We’ll see what sticks” isn’t a plan, it’s a last minute desperate measure to find the right solution.

“Build it and they will come”
Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should. Just like the Facebook example…does the world need another? Test your concept early to see if people care and whether or not it’s worth spending other people’s money on.

“We don’t have time for usability testing”
With all the tools available for usability testing these days, there’s no excuse for not doing it. A little goes a long way with this one.

“We’ll let the users tell us what they want”
While usability testing offers an invaluable means for directly observing your users as they try out your product, it can also turn into a design crutch. Usability testing should only be used to confirm the validity of your concepts and not as a means to arrive to them. The customer doesn’t always know what they want.

U. of Product Design
Lastly, we’re fortunate to live in a time when knowledge is so easy to come by. Many of the top interactive design studios and universities offer courses for those who would like to become better product leaders. Here are a few, all located in the Bay Area:

Cooper Cooper | U
Adaptive Path In-house Training and Virtual Seminars
Silicon Valley Product Group Public Workshops
Stanford D. School Exec Ed

Related Posts:
Why Some Startups Fail
Design Thinking 101
Help! My Designer Wants a “Discovery Phase”

Frustration runs both ways: designers are disappointed when the client doesn’t value the discovery phase. Client’s attitudes of just “seeing what sticks” or “build it and they will come” can seem naive and reckless to designers.

On the other hand, clients may interpret a discovery phase as “busy work”, a “nice-to-have”, “paralysis analysis” or even worse—a means for the designer to squeeze a few more dollars out of their budget! There might also be a feeling that designers are “artists” and their place isn’t in the conference room helping to strategize the best way to build their product or service. Whatever the reason or bias may be, there’s often confusion around what added value, if any, the discovery phase brings to a project.

Think of the discovery phase as laying the foundation for everything that follows: features, page flows, screen details, branding, copy, coding, launch dates, user traffic and ultimately, business success. Designers like to call this phase of product development “discovery” because what they’re doing is finding out what really matters. Most importantly they’re confirming that what matters to the client is in-line with what matters to the client’s users and customers. Through a discovery process designers are able to rule-out certain directions that show potential for failure and help increase chances for building a successful product. A professional designer isn’t just interested in creating something that looks good, but also something that functions well and that resonates with users and customers.

Some fears clients may have are that a discovery phase will take too long, cost too much and will only produce “opinions”. The attitude might be that any discovery phase should be done on the designer’s own watch and that it’s really for their benefit anyway.

While it’s true that a designer will need to spend some time getting up-to-speed with the client’s business, this is not their biggest challenge. More time will be spent understanding what the users’ needs, behaviors and attitudes are. You might be asking, “Can’t Marketing just provide that information?” Marketing can usually provide demographics, brand assets, copy and sometimes even survey results relevant to the project. However, Marketing may not have answers to specific questions around what kind of experience users are looking for. Also, what customers say is not the same as what they do. A discovery process may also include observing users in their own environment to gain more insight into what the user is thinking. Lastly, Marketing is often good at providing qualitative measurements, but not quantitative measurements such as how the user or customer “feels” about a particular feature.

Clients who wish to see product building initiated immediately may be aggravated by any extra time and money spent doing research. However, in the long run doing your homework could save a lot of time, money and maybe even the company’s life. Not only could it save a company from launching a product that nobody cares about, but it could also save a company from wasting resources in the more expensive coding phase of product development where the burn rate goes up. Another thing to keep in mind is that a discovery phase can easily be customized to match your budget and schedule. In this case, a little bit goes a long way and is exponentially better than doing no discovery at all.

The goal of the discovery phase obviously isn’t to share with the client information they already have (although it might help to confirm it). Typical deliverables include a competitive audit, personas, user scenarios, a project plan and a design brief.

A competitive audit is a deliverable that provides the client with information on what the competition or near competition is doing, what users are already accustomed to, and any areas for differentiation. It’s putting a magnifying glass to the competition and might even go so far as conducting usability testing of their products and services in order to find out what their customers like/dislike about them. Competitive audits are typically delivered with three sections with the first including a summary of the findings and recommendations; the second being a summary of each competitor’s site plus screenshots; and a third being a comparison chart which acts as a tally sheet for who has what. The idea is to not only identify what the competition has, but what they don’t have.

Beyond documentation, the discovery phase also is a time to create some great tools to aid the design process going forward. User experience designers find it helpful to use personas, or fictitious characters that personify user scenarios, to unify the product development team around a central vision and give a voice to the user. Personas are only half-made up—that is, they’re based on audience demographics and research. A product or service might have multiple personas each representing a different category of user. Nevertheless, there’s always 1-2 primary personas. Personas help the product team focus on who really matters versus trying to satisfy everyone. The persona’s demographics, needs, behaviors and attitudes are laid out on a single sheet of paper and taped to the wall for quick reference. It’s not uncommon for team members to challenge each other by asking what a particular persona would do in a given situation.

Lastly, a discovery process gives the designer time to gather technical specifications, prioritize and rate features, create schedules and summarize everything in a design brief—all which is important for demonstrating there’s a process, rallying the troops and making sure the design or build doesn’t go sideways.

Of course, there may be times when a discovery phase needs to be augmented with usability testing or another form of direct observation such as a day-in-the-life study. A new product or service always warrants a thorough discovery phase. If anything, it’s used to reduce the risk of designing and building something that nobody cares about. A discovery phase is also appropriate for re-designs, as the competition has mostly likely changed as well as the attitudes of users. What better time to make sure you understand your users and make any changes than when re-designing your product.

In summary the discovery phase helps to:

• Reduce risk
• Unify the product team under a central vision
• Provide context for the product team
• Advocate users’ needs, behaviors and attitudes
• Know the competition at a granular level
• Justify decisions
• Discover something the user or customer didn’t know they needed/wanted

Related Posts:
Design Thinking 101

Cagan argues that startups work terribly inefficiently in spite of limited funding and time. Not only does this inefficiency cost money and time, it may also cause many startups to never reach it to market!!! According to Cagan, this is why many startups fail. They ”simply don’t have the funding to go to two years before they gain traction in the marketplace. So they hire engineers, take their best shot, and see what happens. Ready, fire, aim.”

Here’s the complete scenario as he describes it:

Someone with an idea get some seed funding, and the first thing he does is hire some engineers to start building something. The founder will have definite ideas on what she wants, and she’ll typically act as product manager and often product designer, and the engineering team will then go from there. The companies are typically operating in “stealth mode” so there’s little customer interaction. It takes much longer than originally thought for the engineering team to build something, because the requirements and the design are being figured out on-the-fly.

After six months or so, engineers have things in sort of an alpha or beta state, and that’s when they first show the product around. This first viewing rarely goes well, and the team starts scrambling. The run rate is high because there’s now an engineering team building this thing as fast as they can, so the money is running out and the product isn’t yet there. Maybe the company gets additional funding and a chance to get the product right, but often it doesn’t. Many startups try to get more time by outsourcing engineering to a low-cost offshore firm, but they’re still left with the same process and the same problems.

So as Cagan states, engineers are typically brought into a project at an early stage and they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to code and test new ideas at the same time. Sometimes weeks of coding are thrown out the window as the company “feels” itself through the unfolding product. For small startups it’s like pouring a house’s foundation and at the same time, deciding where the walls go.

But Marty Cagan isn’t some cranky product manager trying to wreak havoc on the startup community. He continues to describe what a more efficient process might look like:

Here’s a very different approach to new product creation, one that costs dramatically less and is much more likely to yield the results you want: the founder hires a product manager, an interaction designer, and a prototyper. Sometimes the designer can also serve as prototyper, and sometimes the founder can serve as a product manager, but one way or another, you have these three functions lined up—product management, interaction design, and prototyping—and the team starts a process of very rapid product discovery.

Cagan emphasizes that the focus is on product discovery via a high-fidelity prototype that mimics the desired user experience. But this isn’t enough—you must validate the product design with real users that fit your target audience. Without testing real users, you’re still in the dark when it comes to understanding how your users may respond to your product or service.

What then continues is a refinement process that includes several versions of the prototype in order to get closer to a winning product. The end result is that you have:

(a) identified a product that you have validated with the target market, (b) a very rich prototype that serves as a living spec for the engineering team to build from, and (c) a much greater understanding of what you’re getting into, and what you’ll need to do to succeed.

The engineers are then brought on and they’re able to build something based on a clear vision of the product and a stable spec. Not only does this make the engineers’ job much easier, but the company has reduced the risk of shipping a flop and has also saved a lot of time and money on development. The startup is building a successful product “on purpose”.

Cagan finishes his argument by asking:

So why don’t all startup teams do this? Because we’re such an engineering-driven industry that we just naturally start there. But any startup has to realize everything starts with the right product, so the first order of business is to figure out what that is before burning through $500K or more in seed funding.

…Definitely something to think about for your next startup.