Here are some lessons from building new products that I would follow today:
Before I get into the lessons, let me give you a little background.
Some years ago I was able to create some interesting products for some large and well-known brands like Emirates, and what I reflect on today is how little we actually focused on behavior and psychology back then.
I mean, we used things like empathy maps, journey maps, and jobs to be done, but never with the actual focus on getting our customers to take action or understanding the why.
It was not really a mental model we had back then, to think about and then design for enabling our customers to take specific actions.
We were all entranced with the move quickly and break things motto 😐
It got me thinking about how much better these products could have been if we had applied a behavioral lens and insights to our work.
So what should you do if you are building a new product:
1) Think about and write out the most important actions you want your customers to take in your product (map them out and prioritize them)
2) Think about the context - where will they use your product, how often, with whom
3) Identify what can enable or hinder the actions: Understanding your customer's frustrations, challenges, and problems from a behavioral perspective will be a competitive advantage - think psychological, environmental, social, and internal
4) Make your product easy to use, taking into account the user's cognitive load and attention, and memory
5)The design of the product should be based on your customer's unmet needs and not the designer's or your own preferences
6) Help your customers progress in the product and get better (don't make it too difficult at first, or you will lose them
7) Give your customers choices to do the job how they need to do it - not how you think they should do it
8) Use defaults: Defaults are pre-set options that users can choose or change. Defaults can help with salience and make it easier to choose
9) Simplify decision-making: - I know it's fun to think about your customers as wanting to play with all your features, but the reality is that most customers will get overwhelmed if there are too many distractions
10) Use visual cues: a progress bar, for example, can show how much of a task has been completed/how much to go and remove uncertainty
Bonus 11) Make it social (if possible): We are social and are more likely to engage with a product that involves social interaction
Now go out there and build some great value-producing products!
P.S if you need help building a new product or improving your current one get in touch
#behavioralscience #digitaltransformation #productmanagement
