Designing Products People Love: How Great Designers Create Successful Products

Well, you’re in luck, because you can jump inside the head of Rowling while she wrote The Order of the Phoenix. A sample page of her handwritten plot spreadsheet surfaced online in 2010. The columns dividing the spreadsheet consist of chapter numbers, story timeline, main plot points, subplots, and chapter titles (Figure 4-2).[75]

At the end [of the product definition meeting], leave with: What you’re doing. Why you’re doing it (problems you’re trying to solve). What success looks like (quantitatively and qualitatively).

ATM looks

But it’s so easy to get caught up in the echo chamber of the self-congratulatory technology community. Product design has, in some circles, become synonymous with the glossy, the beautiful, and the stylish.

Hillman likens this belief to the dichotomy between observing lions in the zoo and how they behave in the wild: Imagine going to see the lions on display in the zoo. Now imagine seeing the same species of lion in the wild on an African safari. Technically, you’re looking at the same animal both times. But they behave differently in the wild than th

military values of service, honor, and valor.

When it comes to your product, you can’t treat your customers as existing on an equal playing field. Not every customer is as valuable as the next one. Some have experienced parts of your product that others haven’t. Some pay you money. Some don’t. Some are new; some are old. Some have just signed up and are incredibly active. Some are inactive, an

Why’s this important when creating products? Because this observation enlightens us about two really important things: the contexts in which customers might use a product, and how that affects the relative value of your product in their daily lives.

If you want to jump into the user onboarding pool, I highly recommend Samuel Hulick’s excellent The Elements of User Onboarding.[101