Making products easy

Making products easy is hard. It’s painstaking work. Let’s start at the top.

As a product leader, making things easy starts by protecting time for ease of use in every release. It's key to educate your stakeholders and organisation that easy is valuable and often wins. Some organisations have cultures who understand that “easy is important” and other orgs focus more on shipping features than shipping ease of use. It’s you job to win that space for ease of use in each release for your team. 

Once you have space to invest in Easy, the hard stuff begins. How to do make a product easy to use. 

At the start should be prioritising. Identifying the most “used paths”. This strategy starts by listing the most used parts of your application, and investing in the top ones the most. The goal is to apply the 80/20 principle. So that you can improve 20% of the experience to drive 80% of the ease of use. It’s probably more like 95/5 tbh than 80/20. There's only a few paths that are used a huge number of times. 

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I'm reminded of Hemingway who supposedly edited the first page of For Whom the Bell Tolls maybe 80 times. It's such an important page that it makes sense to put in the sweat for that.

I also have come to realise that there are 2 experience paths in a product to understand. The “trial” or “sales” path and the common user path. That is, you need to value separately the experience that drives revenue (the sales path). This where users sign up, and maybe use it for the first time. Versus the experience of the everyday day user who already bought your product. I’ve had different teams on each, dedicated, to ensure stakeholders (sales vs product teams) felt their interests were protected. But as long as you can prioritise accurately there’s no need to dedicate resources. 

How do you actually make things easy. Oooff. There’s lots of techniques here. I wouldn’t be able to be comprehensive, so I’ll just illustrate some techniques. An experienced talented designer knows the compendium. 

One technique is to design for the vanilla easy case and push every hard decision for the user under an “Advanced...” button. That way you declutter the interface and you also remove decision points that challenge the user. 

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Another technique is to push out a lot of tough interface decision to a “preferences” place or “options”. That way advanced users have a place to make the configurations they want while typical users can enjoy a simple interface. 

Another technique involves doing user research. And finding the places where users get stymied. It might be simple things like copy text. Or it might be things that are actually incongruent but that you’re too close to see them. Of course, all these techniques work together.

Finally one more technique is to examine the logs of your application. If you find that many user journeys end up in dead ends where they shouldn’t be. That will show you where things are ending up poorly. 

Before I conclude, the reminder of the value of easy is simple. As you grow your user base, you often find cohorts that are less advanced or less needy of your product. They're more likely to give up where others persevered. Your ratio of Ease of Use / Value changes as these new cohorts join. Removing friction gets you these users. Also, the lower the barrier to use, the more likely you can retain your existing user base. 

Hopefully that gives you some starting points on how to simplify a product.

Headline Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash