Purpose driven design

I have transitioned from arts to design and many times, I have pondered upon the many differences and similarities between these two. Personally, when I created art I created for myself but when I now look at it from a product designer's perspective, I did take into consideration the aesthetics, and what made my work pleasing. I also validated it by representing it to the world. However, the core difference is that we do not measure through metrics the impact of art. And so my thoughts...

While art has it's purpose, that may serve as self gratification or an emotion that is triggered for the audience, ultimately is driven by a defined objective. Product design too is created with a purpose, one that can balance the purpose of businesses and the users and that is measurable through certain metrics quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Everything that a user sees on their screens has an objective that made it to behave and appear in a certain way.

Discovering value:

Using extensive research and data is how we discover the real value. It is the process of understanding a behaviour and uncovering and identifying the cause for the behaviour. The initial data can be collected through various qualitative and quantitative tools. As product teams, we use not just data analytics but also market research, surveys and user feedback to penetrate deeper to understand these problems. The first step is to ask the right questions. The answers shall follow.

Leading with empathy:

The product decisions in design that are based on empathy and rooted in solving the real problems suffered by the product users helps users in placing trust in the product. This is turn helps businesses to have a real valuable user base that find the hook to stay in the product environment and thus creating loyalty. Only when the users find their purpose is being served, they will stick more.

Prioritisation based on impact:

Uncovering the discrepancies and opportunities for improvement results in a lot of ideas of improving the product. However, as product teams, we have limited time and resources and also metrics to move inside the company. Finding a solution that can have a high impact in solving user problems and impact the UX metrics can help in the longer run. Businesses focus solely on the KPIs that can be calculated quantitatively. However, in order to discover real problems, we need to also map real metrics, ones that are more human.

Designing for context:

Considering every part of the user’s experience when making the design decisions by mapping the customer journey and finding opportunities in process to solving the specific problem. It is about aligning the purpose of a product with the user's requirements. Where you are matters just as much as the size of your screen.

The obvious UX:

Designing a user experience that is intuitive and with the least learning curve to optimise the user experience results in easy adoption of the product. However, it takes time and effort to build smoother products with the most simplest solutions and getting there is a tough path. The one thing that keeps us going is making decisions keeping in mind always the end goal. Reminding the team everyday of why we are pushing for the specific outcome can help eliminate many doubts and avoid taking shortcuts.

Credibility for decisions:

We cannot guess the usability and credibility of the solutions without any validation. Data can help us take decisions at each point. And so design validation makes a crucial step in designing for the end goal. Not only it makes the design decisions credible by backing with user validation but also adds to the mass bank of knowledge that we acquire about the product that can help us in setting future precedents and building features on top of that.

Finally, remember to keep it human. Emotion is at the core of our design. And in our journey of creating a product that serves the right purpose, we also need to fuel it with delight. A good product with smooth and delightful experiences not only results in easy adoption and learning of the product and it's use but also increases the retention.

Moments of delight in the product that ignite a positive reaction and embeds a true connection with the users.