Designing Products People Love: How Great Designers Create Successful Products

A prototype can serve many purposes. It can be just for demonstrating an idea, it can be for exploring and testing an idea, it can be for selling an idea, or it can be to build an MVP,” says Ting.
But prototypes are ultimately storytelling tools. If you can tell a better story because of the prototype, then you’ve already come a long way toward building a product that solves your customer’s pain

That comes from empathy. They get outside their own frame of reference so they can make something that touches the masses.
And “taste” kills empathy. Taste is when you’ve amassed enough of those cultural influences that you start to believe the ideas and the cultural synthesis come from within. The moment that happens you stop observing. You stop absorbing the influences because you see yourself as the source. It’s subtle, easy to miss. But slowly your source material narrows, your resources diminish, and you are left to repeat yourself. Culture goes on, dynamic and ever changing, and you are left with the same material to chew on. This is where “taste” leads you

A lot of people try to get everything they want to get done, done, and not just—is this good enough to solve the problem? Because if it is, let’s get it out.

So I think those three: having this vision of how the world looks different, understanding just the first baby steps that you need to make so that if you get that right then you get the right to do your next ones and the next ones, and then the third being keeping it simple and getting it out and learning, and accepting it’s a little bit messy, were a huge impact. That’s very different than Apple, but by all means Apple runs as a very different company than the rest of us, and those startups shouldn’t compare themselves to Apple today because that’s just impossible.

Realizing that you weren’t going to get that world different overnight by just making your product and getting everyone to do it, but that it was going to take a little while.

The first one is, they really had a vision for how the world could be different if the company was successful. For whatever reason, it’s not how can the company be successful, how can the product be successful. But really, this theory that the world could be different if this company is successful. But it was really powerful. At RealNetworks it was audio and video over the Internet. Imagine when all audio and video is delivered over IP. We’re starting to live in that world. It’s incredible what you can do with YouTube and Netflix and video on demand.

Timoni West and Kyle Bragger—who created products for Foursquare, Flickr, and Elepath—independently identified their secret to a successful launch: monitoring customer support.

I usually start with looking at flows on sites like UXarchive.com which I find super helpful to get an overview of how people are tackling the same problem we are. I just looked it up and I have 225 apps on my phone, many of which are in folders named “Design” or “Testing Out.”

“[Scott] Cook reembraced a P&G fundamental—that new products should be based on actual customer behaviors, not on what customers said they wanted to do,” recount the authors of the book Inside Intuit. “Many customers said that they should do a better job of retirement planning and told the company that they would purchase Intuit’s product to do so. However, since customers by and large did no financial planning before Intuit’s product came to the market, Intuit’s product could not persuade them to start.”

Once a clickable prototype is done, we spend a lot of time doing usability testing, if you want to call it that, or early testing with actual users/customers on those flows to make sure that we are not missing anything,” he said in our interview. “We like to get something that works, especially with the analytics tool at KISSmetrics, to a customer as fast as possible using their own data—because an analytics tool is really about your own data.