Develop your product sense with this product teardown exercise
Develop your product sense with this product teardown exercise
Let's practice! Let's build your product sense.
A master like Van Gogh has an excellent intuition for using the right color in his paintings. Product sense is like that. It's an intuition to build the great product that people want.
In practice, it's a skill to (1) discover user needs and (2) creatively develop solutions to address them. As a result, you can build a product that people want.
When someone has no product sense, they focus on the wrong things:
Worrying about the timeline and launching it even though it's not valuable
Ignoring small micro-interactions, so they fail to delight users
Obsessing about the cool technology but not sure how it helps the users
Product designers should develop product sense. Here's how:
Pick one software you use the most (or popular product).
Find its competitor.
Do a product teardown exercise.
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Product teardown exercise
The goal of this exercise is to strengthen your product sense by using a product and analyzing it. Why some products work well, and others don't. It's an excellent opportunity to identify standard UX best practices and paradigms.
Let’s go through an example. I pick Duolingo and Memrise as a product teardown exercise. They’re in a similar category: to help people learn a new language.
#1: What’s the experience of getting started?
Observing how other products build momentum for new users when they start can help you design a good activation user journey.
Duolingo: My first experience with Duolingo was terrific. I noticed that Duolingo never asks me to sign up. I could instantly immerse myself in learning the new language. On top of that, there’s a fun character talking to me! That’s a moment of delight.
Memrise: With Memrise, I can see a real local person talking. That is great because I can start imitating how they talk. However, unlike Duolingo, the first-time experience in Memrise is more choppy. I must sign up, answer questions, and decide whether to subscribe to their pro plan.
Learnings: From this comparison exercise, I noticed that delaying sign-up as long as possible is valuable. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines also mention this. Additionally, I appreciate all the small animations that make me smile a little while using Duolingo. When we design software, we often are not intentional about what emotions we want our users to feel.
