Product Design: 5 Things To Know Before Creating a Modern Digital Product
In this current era, product design has been described as the brand itself. To put it another way, product design has the potential to make or break a brand.
Product design is the foundation upon which a tech-oriented brand is built, if we dare to say so.
Even if you have the best marketing or public relations team pushing the brand and gaining users, if the product fails to deliver on what the brand promises or the experience isn’t wholesome, these users will not stick around for long!
It is important to note that product design does not solve problems; however, if you nail it, it will most likely solve the problems of users. As a result, the product team must understand the importance of data-driven decisions.
Understanding the business value behind each decision is an important aspect of Product Design. Data should drive everything you do, user research should be used instead of assumptions, and progress should be tracked to help improve the user’s experience.
This essentially means that the Product Design team within the brand should understand and collaborate closely with the Marketing team especially.
We designed and are still improving on designing an experience (that’s what I call it) at Clooper; we are designing a platform where people can find an ideal place to call home and live joyfully. For us, designing this takes into account everything that makes using this platform a wholesome experience.
Clooper’s product owner is our co-founder Matt Wilson. And he leads the product design team. With over ten (10) years of experience in technology delivery (including FTSE 100) and consulting, leading and delivering customer-centric IT solutions and process improvements to brands, he’s had a very busy year leading a team, designing and making major changes to the Clooper platform this year.
Matt walks the entire team through the platform at different points so we thought to beam the spotlight on Matt and the magic he’s created (and continues to create, we believe it’s a continuous process) with his team, particularly this year (2021).
Tell us about everything you did this year to design and update the Clooper platform, Matt
This year has all been about making our offering clearer and easier to understand for our prospective customers.
This was the key data we were getting back from users that had come through the marketing funnel or we had interviewed. They just weren’t quite clear what the platform did. Coupled with this the platform was suffering from too many glitches, too often.
So we took a step back and completely re-analysed every process we had built to re-prioritise the most important things first. The result of this was to strip out a lot of the more complex ‘nice to have’ processes for each of our users, to solve for the key headache we understand our target audience to have, namely finding a good home to live in and living joyfully.
Our customers are now shown a very clear message about what the platform does and we have delivered an excellent user experience for this core problem. The onboarding of a user is now very clear and supportive and bug-free, due to the extensive testing put in place.
What are the five (5) things you believe one should be aware of before creating a modern (day) digital product?
- Do not try to build everything at once, even though you will find many competitors that are already solving more problems than you. Definitely, do not get bogged down in searching too much about what your competitors are doing.
- Do try to get to real users to understand the problem more. User interviews, friends/family, anyone who knows about the issues, get out there to try and find where the real pain is.
- Ensure that people know what you are offering and that your onboarding process is clear and with as few blockers to using the platform as possible.
- In modern-day SaaS offerings, you do not have a captive audience, unlike in a corporate world. Do make sure the product sells itself, supports the user with great UX design and looks smart.
- Keep the eventual goal in sight, but be prepared to flex and change as the customer feedback comes in. If you are at a point where customer feedback is coming in, you are doing well!
Clooper’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Matt Wilson, has over ten (10) years of experience in technology delivery (including FTSE 100) and consulting, leading and delivering customer-centric IT solutions and process improvements to brands such as Control Risks, G4S, and Lloyds Register.
He is passionate about analyzing people’s business processes in order to provide user-friendly IT solutions. He holds ISEB-BCS Diplomas in Business Analysis, Business Consulting, and System Testing.
Matt started his career in information technology as a business analyst, quickly moving up to mentoring and managing teams of analysts on large-scale transformation projects. He has extensive experience working across the software development lifecycle and has worn many hats over the years, from quality assurance lead to project and, most recently, program management.
Get to know more about Clooper here
