How to Design Great Product

The difference between a basic prototype and a great product is a mile wide and just as deep.

Prototypes are cheap and easy to throw up very quickly. When you first start a new project, it’s largely driven by the initial momentum of doing something brand new, that’s never been done before. Since nothing has been built yet, it’s freeing to have the ability to work on so many new distinct areas of the product. The progress feels rapid simply because you have no users. If your homepage doesn’t render in Internet Explorer, who cares?! No one’s using the site yet. If a button click fails randomly once every 100 times, it doesn’t matter! There’s no one to complain about it yet.

That feeling of pure, unadulterated joy in creating a product is unmatched. Our brains are great at perceiving relative change. There’s an instant dopamine reaction the second that first user signs up. “OMG, we’re building something that someone actually wants to use!” Simply put, this is why starting new products, or a brand new codebase feels so gratifying. It’s a dramatic break from our typical mundane routine.

Conversely, our brains are exceptionally poor at sustaining that high if the relative change or acceleration of progress doesn’t continue. The same dopamine hit that we first received simply by having a single user sign up, quickly wears off. We now need ten people to sign up to elicit the exact same reaction. Then a hundred people. Then a thousand.

Change in growth is what we can perceive and what feels like measurable progress. Minor changes like tweaking the text copy to make it easier for 0.01% of users to understand the product doesn’t feel like true progress.

This is why there are so few, truly great products. The creator’s brain is wired to chase the same sweeping macro level changes that so dramatically increased early growth when the product was first getting started. Paradoxically, it’s the attention to detail — the minor tweaks, the selection of a red button over a blue one — that drives marginal growth. Each individual design change on its own feels inconsequential, but it’s the collective sum of these changes that make the product more accessible to a broader swath of people. Simply put, this is why it’s so difficult to create great product.

So how do we fight this instinct? How do we train ourselves to focus on the incremental improvements that compound into something great? We need a framework — a way to prioritize what matters at each stage of a product’s evolution.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Product Design

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a well-known theory in psychology of the key ingredients necessary for a human to survive and thrive. It’s often portrayed with the basic requirements for survival at the base of the pyramid — physiological needs like food, water, and sleep. A bit higher up the chain are personal safety, then slowly proceeding to love and belonging, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization.

Without any of the base layers, the subsequent higher layers have little impact on contributing to your overall well-being. It’s only when the needs of each lower tier have been thoroughly satisfied that addressing the higher tiers has a meaningful impact.

Analogously, product design should be driven entirely by a hierarchy of user needs.

Useful

A product being useful is defined very simply. If there is a non-negligible group of people who suffer from a particular problem and your product eliminates that problem, then it’s useful. For this very reason, need-finding is the absolute first step in the product design process. If there isn’t a pressing need for your product to exist, then it probably shouldn’t.

This seems intuitive, but every year there are hordes of companies that are started simply because the technology they’ve developed is innovative and novel, not because they’ve created a real-world solution to a problem. Pure technology definitely has its place. But it’s within the R&D division of a large company or in a lab at a research university, not as the primary product in a customer-oriented business.

Let’s say you were in ancient China and decided to investigate the market of people getting wet in the rain. Your very first step would be to survey a number of people who were drenched in the rain and establish that they’d really much rather prefer to be dry when it rains. You’ve now come across a pressing problem that begs to be solved.

Functional

Now that we’ve found a problem that affects a valuable base of potential customers, our goal is to come up with a basic solution that obviates it. The next question is whether the product can actually be used in the way that it’s intended.

You’ve figured out that people are willing to pay for a device that protects them from the rain. Your first attempt at a solution is a simple plank of wood, that people hold over their heads to protect themselves from the rain. It’s functional and solves the immediate issue, but has some lingering problems that we’ll soon discover.

Reliable

Does the product work consistently for everyone? Is it error-free and do people feel assured that it will continue to work correctly? This is one of the hardest parts of building a great product. System reliability is a core user requirement for using a service, but admittedly it’s the most unsexy part of product development. Every engineer worth their salt knows there’s no such thing as “error-free” and there are always issues that could never have been predicted until they actually occur. The goal is to get as close as possible to this ideal state, by building a fault-tolerant, redundant system.

It turns out that a flat plank of wood isn’t very good at consistently keeping people dry. If two people walk side by side, they get splashed by water droplets ricocheting off the other’s plank. You head back to the drawing board and craft a concave curved piece of wood designed to have water droplets fall straight down. You call this innovative device an “umbrella.”

Intentional

Does the product do exactly what I intended in the manner that is most intuitive? Does clicking a button meet my expectations of what that button was supposed to do? Are pages organized correctly? Are actions clearly organized? Does each interaction logically follow from the previous point in the interface?

Your poor umbrella customers are still holding this curved piece of wood above their heads. You hear complaints that their arms are getting tired and they can’t walk long distances with the umbrella. As an innovative product designer, you decide to add a handle that is vertically fixed to the centerpiece of the wood. You also decide to replace the heavy curved wood with a lightweight mosaic of leaves attached to a rigid bamboo frame. Holding the umbrella now feels much more natural and is suitable for long excursions. Your customers are delighted!

Aesthetic

Does the aesthetic of the product match my internal measure for something well-designed? Is it pleasing to the eye? When the average person thinks of design, most likely it is this layer that they’re referring to. As we’ve seen though, there are four underlying levels that need to be addressed in the evolution of a product before its visual aesthetic makes even the slightest bit of difference to a customer’s needs.

This is arguably the level of the hierarchy where your product can best differentiate itself. According to one study, electric shavers that were aesthetically appealing were able to command a 30% premium compared to a similar functionally equivalent shaver. People react instinctively to products based on their appearance. For this reason, visual design executed well can serve to help your product rise above the competition.

However, visual design is still purely a surface-level judgment. If the product falls over the first time a user attempts to use it, then the aesthetic layer collapses in on itself.

Resisting the instinct

The contrast in the needs of a product’s creator and its users should be clear. The product creator’s natural instinct is to chase the same initial high she felt at the beginning of the product development process. The easiest way to do this is to simply tack on new features, as each feature feels like measurable progress.

As product creators, we need to resist this instinct and reconcile our own needs with the diametrically opposite needs of our users. Maslow’s hierarchy is useful as a framework to understand what parts of the product deserve the most attention at any point in time. For any product, there are a hundred different new features that design and development time could go towards. Great product design is not merely checking off each of these features but limiting our focus to a specific narrow problem that is most worth pursuing and then solving it thoroughly from the bottom upwards.

Solve each layer completely before discovering and addressing the next most pressing user problem. Great product design takes incredible focus and self-discipline to quiet our natural instinct to chase novelty. The next time you feel the urge to build a shiny new feature, ask yourself: have I truly nailed the fundamentals for the people already using what I’ve built?

Great products are not built by chasing the next dopamine hit. They are built by people who find satisfaction in the unsexy work of getting the basics right.