How to Design a Web App People Love
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How to Design a Web App People Love By Pete Kistler Co-Founder & Lead Product Designer | BrandYourself.com
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20-Sep-2014 -
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Internet
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This was a presentation I gave about how to design a product people will love. My goal was to keep it concise, practical, and include real examples. Note: I found this on my hard drive and decided to upload it, some day I'll actually put some time into making it look nice :)
Transcript of How to Design a Web App People Love
How to Design a Web App People LoveBy Pete Kistler
Co-Founder & Lead Product Designer | BrandYourself.com
What We’ll Cover Today
1. Identify a real problem 2. Define your minimum viable product3. Design your interface4. Usability test your interface – and iterate5. Inject humanity into it
To design a web app people love:
What We’ll Cover Today
1. Identify a real problem 2. Define your minimum viable product3. Design your interface4. Usability test your interface – and iterate5. Inject humanity into it
To design a web app people love:
Real problem: Migraines
“Excedrin Migraine returned my life to me. I absolutely love this product.”
Solution:
Real Problem: employers were Googling me and finding…
I couldn’t fix my problem, because I wasn’t:
A tech genius who could do it
myself
Wealthy enough to pay thousands for a
reputation firm to do it
or
Luckily my friend Patrick had a background in search engines, and helped me fix my Google results...
… but I knew there were tons of other people with the same problem I had.
So I set out to create a DIY product anyone could use to improve their own Google results.
What We’ll Cover Today
To design a product people love:
Minimum Viable Product:
The version of a new product which allows you to collect the most
validated learning about customers with the least effort.
The faster you get your Minimum Viable Product in the hands of real people, the faster you can make it better, and the faster you will turn
into a product people love.
Most Web Apps Take Too Long to Release
Version 1Design
Develop
Release
6 months of wasted time
A Minimum Viable Product With More Iterations is Better
Design Develo
p
1 month
Release
Design Develo
p
1 month
Release
Design Develo
p
1 month
Release
A Minimum Viable Product With More Iterations is Better
Design Develo
p
1 month
Release
Design Develo
p
1 month
Release
Design Develo
p
1 month
Release
A Minimum Viable Product With More Iterations is Better
Twitter’s Minimum Viable Product
Sketch By Jack Dorsey, Founder of Twitter
What We’ll Cover Today
To design a product people love:
Interface Tip #1:
Get Users to Your “Aha” Moment Immediately
“Aha” moment:When a user takes an action that causes them to inherently get how your product works.
BrandYourself’s “Aha” Moment:
When you choose a link you want to show up in your first page of Google, then follow our steps
to boost it higher…
“Aha! This product helps me boost links I want people to find up to the top of my own Google
results.”
1 Year Ago We Asked Users:
How Does BrandYourself Work?
1 Year Ago We Asked Users:
How Does BrandYourself Work?
1. “It grades how good you look in Google.”2. “It lets you create create a profile like
LinkedIn.”3. “It alerts you when new things show up in
Google.”4. And a bunch of other things
Very few people had our “aha” moment:
They were correctly naming features, but less than half had our
“aha” answer.
Why?
Our interface had too much crap in the way of the “aha”
moment, so many people never fully understood it.
BrandYourself’s Old Flow
1. Create an account2. Get Your Search Score3. Create a BrandYourself profile4. Choose links you want to show up high
in Google5. Boost those links higher in Google
BrandYourself’s Old Flow
1. Create an account2. Get Your Search Score3. Create a BrandYourself profile4. Choose links you want to show up high
in Google5. Boost those links higher in Google
Our “aha” moment was buried under less important features
BrandYourself’s New Flow:
1. Create an account2. Boost links you want higher in Google3. Get Your Search Score4. Create a BrandYourself profile
Our “aha” moment now happens immediately for all users
Interface Tip #2: Make Your
Interface Self-Evident
Let’s compare two products that help you clean your Facebook profile by removing unwanted
posts…
What would you do on the next
screen…
They’ve completely hidden their most important feature, which scans your Facebook wall for unwanted posts.
This interface is NOT self-evident.
What would you do on the next
screen…
Delete post
Delete post
Delete post
Delete post
Delete post
Delete post
Potentially unwanted wall posts are highlighted, with an option to delete them.
This interface is self-evident.
Interface Tip #3: Remove All
Unnecessary Interface Elements
Interface Tip #4: Digestibility
Fact of life:We don’t read webpages.
we scan them.
Your interface must be easily scannable and simply to digest at a
glance.
Let’s start with a block of text and
see how scannable we can make it.
58% more readable
58% more readable
47% more readable
58% more readable
47% more readable
27% more readable
58% more readable
47% more readable
27% more readable
124% more readable
The Moral:
Attention is precious, so get to the point quickly without flowery
language and break ideas into bullet points.
What We’ll Cover Today
To design a product people love:
“No design survives contact with the
user.”
“Usability testing is debugging design.”
What is Usability Testing?Watching someone who’s never used your
product to see if it works as intended.
Why Do Usability Tests?After you’ve worked on a product for even a few weeks,
you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.
Usability Testing Is Actually Easy and Fun
During usability tests, you’ll be shocked to learn many things that are clear to you are not clear to others.
Use this script to begin your usability test:
“We’re asking people to try a product we’re working on so we can see whether it works as intended. I want to make it clear that we’re testing the site, not you. You can’t do anything wrong here!
As you use the site, think out loud: say what you’re looking at, what you’re trying to do, and what you’re thinking.
Also, please don’t worry that you’re going to hurt our feelings. We’re doing this to improve the site, so we need to hear your honest reactions.”
Test early, and test often.
Testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. Do it while you still have time
to make changes based on what you learn!
Design Develo
p
Release
Design Develo
p
Release
Design Develo
p
Release
Usability Test Every Release
Usability test
Usability test
Usability test
Guiding Mantras for Usability Testing:
1. Set aside one morning a month to test2. Start earlier than you think makes sense3. Recruit loosely (anyone can be a tester)4. Make it a spectator sport5. Focus on a small number of the most important problems6. When fixing problems, always do the least you can do, then re-test
What We’ll Cover Today
To design a product people love:
Humanity Tip #1:Give your product personality
When we implemented this automated email, our users
loved it:
Humanity Tip #2:Connect emotionally about why you
built it
Our emotional backstory makes users
feel “on our side”:
Be A Real Person (Not a Faceless
Corporation)
We Don’t Have “Support”… We Have Trevor.
And is Trevor Consistently Part of the Product Experience,
Including Emails
What We’ll Cover Today
To design a product people love:
Solve a problem by launching a minimum viable product.
Then design a self-evident interface that’s been usability tested and
creates a human connection.
To recap:
Hopefully, you’re now on your way to creating a web app
people love!
A quick comic before we go to questions:
