When we think of User Experience (UX), we often think of a product with a simple, beautiful, and easy-to-use feature set that makes a user’s life easier. However, features are only a small part of the product. They are just a few of the many solutions to a user’s problem that the product tries to solve. Thinking in products means thinking about specific user problems, goals, and revenues.
The core user experience is not just a set of features, but it is the job that users hire the product. For example, Uber’s core user experience is to get a taxi easily at any time. The countdown, which displays when exactly the taxi will arrive, is a suitable feature that expands this experience. However, Uber’s product works regardless of this feature. The countdown, on the other hand, cannot exist without the product. There is a one-way interrelationship between feature and product: features don’t work without the product. This is why designers should think about products first.
To build the right product, designers should uncover the core jobs that the product is hired for. A product fulfils a need or solves a problem that people have. If the problem is non-existent, or the solution doesn’t fit the problem, the product becomes meaningless, and people won’t use it. To minimize the risk of building something that nobody wants, designers can observe and talk to people to uncover the real problem and build solutions that customers really want.
Clay Christensen, for instance, once tried to improve the sales of milkshakes by making them sweeter, offering them in different tastes, and slightly increasing the size of the cups. However, none of these solutions worked out until he started observing the customers who bought milkshakes. He found out that the job the customers hired the milkshake for was to make their morning car ride to work less boring. The big benefit a milkshake has is that it is a thick drink that lasts longer than any other drink and stuffs the stomach. This was the real problem, which the customers had no idea about. In the end, Christensen came up with a solution to make the milkshake even thicker, which led to an increase in sales numbers.
Thinking about products helps build successful features. By defining the problems the product tackles, it answers the question “Why do we build this product?”. Defining the target audience “Who has these problems?” and defining the solution “How are we doing this?” will give enough guidance to create a new feature. Setting up a goal will help to measure the success of this feature.
Products become meaningful when the provided solution fits the uncovered problem. This solution describes the way how a problem will be solved. Thus, the problem-solution-fit defines the core user experience of a product. The concrete features extend this experience and support the core experience, but they cannot replace it. Interaction Design and Visual Design can make a product beautiful, easy to use, and delightful or make it stand out in the competition, though it can’t make the product meaningful. This is why a proper problem-solution fit is critical for the success of a product.
When thinking in products, UX designers should be able to answer the following questions first: What problem do we solve? (User problem). For whom are we doing this? (Target audience). Why are we doing this? (Vision). How are we doing this? (Strategy) and what do we want to achieve? (Goals). Only then does it make sense to think about what exactly we are doing (Features).
Thinking in products gives designers the advantage of building the right features for the right people. It helps understand the user experience of a product as a whole, not just as the Interaction and Visual Design of features. It makes sure