How to Start Creating a Super UI for Your Product – a Product Manager`s Perspective
Who wouldn´t want to benefit from the all the goodies that products with good UI’s enable us to have. Product managers all over the world dream daily of increased sales generated from recommendations, virality and increased user loyalty.
But achieving this isn’t always easy. Day by day we are faced with various challenges. In order to get a user interface which we can call a super-magnificent-gold-mine, we need to take a methodical approach.
Experience shows that often we won’t benefit from just common sense alone (90% of the time the first version of anything will not work) and hiring superstar designers can set us back as well. Even the second version (iteration) often needs improving.
Gut-based design choices will not give you the results you seek
Here are top 3 things you should be looking at instead:
- Monitor the helpdesk (identify the top 5 problems the customers are faced with)
- Do rapid prototyping
- Do user testing and customer interviews
In order to get results you should make it a habit to do things a bit differently than most.
Look at your clients on a wider scale
What tasks your clients have to solve daily? What are the patterns of product use? How are your customers interacting with it, using it, are they doing anything differently that they were supposed to do? Maybe they have found workarounds to problems that your helpdesk doesn’t even know about?
People are creative and often find workarounds
Finding these kinds of problems requires user tests and interviews, which you should of course do on a constant basis. They are cheap, time effective and, most importantly, let you identify problems and possibilities quickly.
Testing itself is an easy process:
- Find the people either through Facebook, your friend list or through other channels. The only requirement is that are not yet familiar with the product. Family members and close friends can be tricky because they often want to please you and tend to give answers that they think you want to hear.
- Let testers interact with the product. Be quiet and observe. You are here to learn, not to interfere or give ideas.
- Mark down what happened when, how the interaction occurred, what were the errors.
- Ask multiple “why” questions when appropriate.
With testing you will see how people use your product and what problems they face. This will also ensure that you will have a solid product backlog and really know which changes will bring you tangible results.
Always test as early as possible. It is most beneficial to test already on the prototype itself.
Create multiple prototypes and test again
Prototyping the UI itself is a relatively easy process. It can be as simple as doodling the concept up on paper and testing it with customers. You can also use fully featured prototyping tools like Axure RP.
If you implement these simple points then you are already on your way to creating a killer user interface for your product that is envied by many. Remember. Monitor the helpdesk, do prototyping and test-test-test!
