Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Tanira Maurer

A starting guide, with intersectional items.

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Create a good experience

A pretty basic item on this list, but always worth mentioning — Make your product easy to use. Uber asks for a credit card picture instead of making the user type the numbers when signing up – This is an example of using empathy to understand what is not good when filling a form. Dropbox uses a easy concept that we’re all familiar with — how folders work — at the core of its business, so users don’t have to figure out how it works.

Use A.I. to enhance experiences, like improving findability. Use animation to maintain context and give feedback of the user’s actions. Build a design system to guide decisions in many aspects, and keep branding consistent. Make the product habit forming and accessible. There’s a lot in the UX field that will improve products, so definitely pay *extra special* attention to it.

Show and hide as necessary

“The future of technology will be invisible, less interfaces, smarter computers, and more face-to-face time.” — Nina Mehta

Much is being discussed about invisible design. Alexa is often used as an example because it uses voice commands, without an interface. It’s interesting to point out that, although it creates a good experience, the lack of a interface can hide some of Alexa’s functionalities. Good design is helping users to achieve their goals, so carefully decide what to show and what to hide. Invisible design is about what’s behind the curtains — make it work for the best result.

Define the value proposition

As Felipe Rodrigues said, success is not only about the product alone, but also on the consumer’s perception of the value proposition, which will directly impact in how the product must be.

“Value proposition is the set of benefits that customers can expect from your products and services. The difference must be perceived by consumers, otherwise there is no difference.” — Felipe Rodrigues

Image from Value Proposition: Things Designers Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask

Personalize content

What makes Spotify so good? It uses advanced math, tagging, audio analysis, content scanning, taste comparing and so on to personalize content for each user. That’s a great example of a sucessful marriage between human emotional intelligence with machine intelligence.

I believe the greatest challenge of this fourth industrial revolution will be to marry human emotional intelligence to machine intelligence. — Nora Gherbi

Manage it

The product must be managed with clear prioritization. This means being able to say “no” and explain why, balancing needs of customers and stakeholders, creating roadmaps to map the products’ strategy, and more. An evidence-based & metrics-driven decision maker is needed to organize it.

“Good product vision, goal-driven decisions, customer evidence, ruthless prioritization, and clear roadmap communication are essential for product success.” —Jim Semick in Product Roadmaps by ProductPlan

Have a diverse team

We get limited if we only interact with people very similar to us, and then its harder to notice things that a different person would notice.

“Homogeneity is kryptonite to a product team” — Mina Radhakrishnan

We will never know *everything* we need to know about a product, and everybody makes mistakes- that’s why the product needs a team keeping each other on track and benefitting from different backgrounds & experiences.

Accelerate failure

The important thing here is to learn with the failures.

“Each step takes you closer to succeeding; but only if you focus on learning what worked and what did not” — Pascal Finette at The Heretic

Don’t be slow. Run experiments. Iterate. But be fearless, not reckless.

Any more tips to share about product crafting? I would love to hear you in the comments 🙂

How to craft a product was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to craft a product

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