"Build for the Users: A Human-Centered Approach"

Designing for your Users

When a product is designed with the needs and wants of the creators in mind rather than the end users, it can result in a lack of user #engagement and adoption. This can lead to slower #growth or even failure of the product.

What do I mean by Designing for users? Let’s talk in terms of product and growth.

When designing a #product, it is essential to keep the end user at the forefront of every decision. By focusing on the specific pain points and needs of the users, we can ensure that the solution we are creating will effectively address those issues and provide a great user experience.

Every element of a product that a #user interacts with must speak the same language that the user wants it to. Almost none of our parents have #snapchat accounts, even if there are any, it will be a very small proportion because Snapchat #language doesn’t connect our parents whereas #whatsapp, #youtube and a few other products do.

We should all be aware that our users have hired our app/product to help them with certain pain points according to their usage frequency, not according to our expectations of their usage.

I appreciate the concept of "Design for people, Use people language" by Julie Zhuo , as it emphasises the importance of understanding and #communicating with users in a way that is relatable and meaningful to them. Here are a few interesting ideas that I think could be beneficial to consider when #designing and tracking the product:

The below examples tell us how are we having the conversation vs how they can be

How do we increase the usage of this feature? to What changes would make this feature more valuable for people?

The CTR here is really low to It’s because people find it hard to navigate to where the feature exists, so how do we build a better flow

We’re seeing too much churn, what can we do to address that? to People who have tried our product aren’t coming back. Why is that?

We need to improve the metrics. The curves aren’t good yet to Our customers aren’t yet finding our product useful enough to come back to it. So we need to improve the value we have promised to deliver

When you read these items, they pretty much mean the same but the actions that we might take might be different because, in the latter part, we are more obsessed with the customer’s language than the former. In the former part, we are more driven to hit the key metrics (That we think are the ones) and the actions might not “ALWAYS” do justice to what a #customer really wants from our product

Seems easy to implement right? It’s not. Try talking your customer language to every member of the org and you will arrive at the answer