When choices, color, and design really matter
One of the hardest things for me in my transition from interaction designer to product manager was learning to care less about design.
Should applications look clean and professional? Absolutely - things like good spacing and a consistent color palette helps you earn credibility with your audience. Should text be legible and forms readable? Absolutely again - visual cues must work with the kind of rapid ’scanning’ that web users perform in order to speed processing time and reduce errors. But beyond a minimum level of competence, design has to be treated like any other competitive advantage. Will this drive more usage, more customer adoption, nudge my product towards being a de facto standard?
The answer is often “no”.
I can thank a certain large web portal for helping me to see that, several years ago. I was working on a project that was already behind schedule, with a budget strained to capacity, and the main topic of hour-long conference calls would be adding gradient-fill backgrounds to the sidebar, or replacing the standard HTML form buttons with images that had rounded corners to match the Photoshop mocks that some visual designer had put together.
Turning Photoshop mocks into HTML code is a little bit like making sausage: you may like the result, but you don’t want to watch the process. Having been fingers-deep in the process, I was forced to realize that the extra 20, 40, 60 hours that went into these “fit and finish” tweaks were basically an ego project.
Same thing with one of the other features that I consistently shot down with my last product: application “skins”. Every few months, we’d get consumer requests for the ability to customize the look and feel of our web application. Our design was flexible enough to work well in a variety of monitor resolutions, and browser text resizing worked - this was purely wanting to make the background green and the text pink (or whatever people do with skinning.)
Would rounded-corner buttons provide a slightly better experience? Probably (assuming that accessibility concerns were addressed). Would skins provide a slightly better experience? Probably (to the people who bothered to use them; to the other 90% of users they might just add clutter and confusion).
Would either of these be significant enough to drive buying/usage decisions? No way.
But clearly, sometimes better design and more choices do drive buying decisions:
One question to ask is “Do consumers use your product to define themselves?”
Can others see when your consumers are using your product? Can consumers choose the way in which they display, wear, or consume your product? Are consumers more likely to strike up a conversation in a coffee shop with a stranger because they’re both users of your product?
It’s easy to come up with physical product examples (like the iPod shuffle - Apple knows it is a personality-definer; that’s why they advertise them clipped to models’ clothing, already a part of them).
It’s harder to come up with online product examples, but here are a few:
- Email (in general). No one wants a username like sanfran_cindy_2008@… and Yahoo! Mail knows it, so they recently bought some new domains to give users a chance at a shorter username. Among the tech geeks, having your own domain name gives you much higher “geek cred”.
- Facebook applications. High school kids everywhere are FREAKING OUT about the proposed redesign because their profiles are such a significant part of their public persona
- Evite. I’ve never gotten an Evite that looked completely generic/default. Even the least “design-y” of my friends pick some sort of color and design scheme from the provided options.
- Flickr. Why is Flickr really the leader in photo sharing? It’s certainly not the UI - I get lost between simple tasks all the time. But the visual design does exactly what it’s supposed to - puts focus on the photos, not the other widgety things on the page.
- Mint. Mint’s gorgeous design takes an inherently geeky task - managing your money - and makes you feel cool for doing it.
If your product doesn’t have a lot in common with these examples, you may want to rethink offering it in six different colors or spending an extra two weeks of development on eye candy. As much as it may pain your inner designer.
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