Magic Wand for Products: 10 things that create magical experiences

Creating something out of nothing has been traditionally called "magic". What are behind the scenes ingredients and processes to conjure such magic? How do you churn out magical concepts in product that provide that "wow","aww" experience for the users of your product. Here are a list of things that typically one does to recreate magic ;)

1. Understand the user, his mental model and expectations.

Mental models, affordance play a very important role in designing products. One needs to create a user persona, understand the likes and dislikes. Isolate the user's persona from the designer's persona. This is the biggest confound a product creator goes through when he starts designing products. He ends up designing for himself rather than the users. In case, the target user is of the same profile as the designer, this works out very well but in other cases more often than not it leads to a huge gap which kills the product as soon as it hits the market.

2. Simple UX/ design for complex problems.

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is guiding force in creating simple usable products and features. One needs to connect with the user that very instance when the user noticed the product or feature. One needs to focus on navigation, end goals and UI while defining the product. One would want to identify the USP of a product / feature and provide a minimalistic approach in providing options to the user in the flow. One wouldn't want to overwhelm the user with things he can do in an interface as it confuses the hell out of him! Typical one primary action and two secondary actions work out well in an user facing interface. Ideally one should be able to break a complex problem into smaller problems and then solve them one by one or translate this complex problem into a simple problem by changing perspective of design and then solve it.

3. Lateral / cross domain analysis or inspirations

There is a huge overlap in design and processes across verticals. These verticals are at different growth trajectories and at some point solve, solved or will solve problems faced by other verticals. Thus it makes sense to be aware on the developments happening cross industry beyond the realms of your workplace and design principles. You never know, a mediocre or a day to day solution of a vertical maybe the NEXT magic of your domain. Also, one tends to proceed logically in product design to next evolutionally step but bear in mind if you could think of this "evolutionary" step, your competition has already started working on it! So think latterly to create gravity defying experiences.

4. Keep it in line with the product mission, vision and the value system.

More often than not, we get carried away in packing all the features in a product that we can think of. One needs to focus on delivering "the" product with "the" feature sets that "the" user expects. If you need to provide more meat to the product offering either strengthen the core and/or experiment with auxiliary experiences. The aux experiences shouldn't mess up with the core rather they should drive engagement by bringing value to the core. Over a period of time, with traction you need to track these auxiliary experiences and integrate them into the core. These auxiliary and core must conform to the high level mission and vision of the product. Adding the ability to chat in a call management application may not get traction with users downloading your application as it confuses them as to what is the end goal of using/ downloading the app in the first place

5. Ask and observe people using the prototype

In this age of agile and rapid prototyping, one doesn't need to wait to work on something say for 6 months plus to find out if a concept or product will work or not. Create "dirty" prototypes focusing on things you need feedback on and then iterate over them until you get a good idea of what is it that the user will like or not. If your product/ feature when shown to people around you doesn't bring an "aww" in the first glance, you need scrap it and go back to the drawing board and work backwards in identifying the issues.

6. A/B testing, the art of experimenting

The biggest fear in the mind of product designers is the fear of "UNKNOWN". One would want to "FAIL" as fast as possible rather than cling on to mediocrity. Specially in cases that you have a good DAU (Daily Active Users), you would want to create a chain of ambassadors or alpha users who you can engage to get in-field feedback of your product. One would want to reach out to say 10- 15% users and then compare the retention and other KPIs to find out if the new thing is working or not before rolling it out to all the users.

7. In Depth Analytics for new concepts

Analytics play a crucial role in understanding as to what it is that the user likes to do with you product. One would want to capture events that have an impact on engagement, drive downloads, health of the core offering and performance of newly introduce product offerings. Keeping a tab on these parameters will guide you on to what next logical things could be done to remove the obstacles and design new offerings around the things that are working for you.

8. Loop back to the drawing board

After a week or so after every release of a new innovative product launch, go back to the drawing board and analyse what went right and what went wrong? One would look to improve the performance and follow it with a release that fixes edge case scenarios, improves overall performance, brings in low hanging fruits that enhance the UX of that previously released innovative product.

9. In product communication with users

Ratings, Surveys, Comments help the product two ways. One, it helps in bringing a sense of ownership with users. Second, it helps the product designers to understand the pain points and design solutions around them. It also engages them. Ideally you would want to award users in the app user experience who provide feedback. Typically products follow up a successful transaction with a "rate us" option. This helps in converting a goodwill into an actionable feedback loop.

10. Going beyond the obvious with the "play" mode

As per wikipedia, Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics[1] in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems[2] and increase users' self contributions.[3][4] . It sure makes sense to make your product interactive and engaging so that the user achieves the end goal while enjoying the overall experience. This sure goes an extra mile in going beyond the obvious while designing concepts, products and features.

Do you have other such magic portions, invisibility cloaks, flying brooms that helped you creating the magic recently? Feel free to share the magic ;)