When designing products, we often pursue innovation and functional richness, but how to find clarity in the complexity, eliminate interference, and improve the user experience? This article will explore how to create a simple and efficient product through specific cases and psychological theories. Are you ready to take your product design thinking to the next level?
In my recent work, I have done a lot of product design work, and there will be a lot of disagreements in the process of discussing with colleagues, but the discussion process has given me a lot of inspiration. Compared with addition, how to do subtraction is often the most difficult, and I have been exposed to many product design method summaries, but I have never had the opportunity to integrate systematically.
Product design is not only interface UI design, but also includes product architecture and business process content, today I will systematically share the product design methodology with you in combination with cases, hoping to help you better empower your business.
First, the principle of product design
1. Have core values and product lines
Any product will have core values, and the user path generated around the core values is called the product main line. Especially in the current limited growth space, all enterprises want to keep users in their products as much as possible, but not all software needs a simple version of Douyin.
Take Alipay, Jingdong, and Salted Fish as examples, the core values of these three are financial management, e-commerce shopping, and second-hand replacement, and the video content areas of Alipay and Jingdong are filled with too many short videos that do not match the core values/scenes, and it is not clear whether it can increase daily activity and use frequency, but for me, it often gives me a feeling that I am in a very dramatic situation. On the other hand, salted fish, the overall content and its own value scene are still more appropriate.
2. Find the maximum signal-to-noise ratio to reduce interfering information
We often say that the user is simple, the transaction is simple, is to ensure that users can experience the use of the product in the simplest way, especially in the transaction products, the most direct and effective way to improve the transaction rate is to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and achieve the ultimate subtraction.
Compared with the complexity of B-end products, subtraction is not to delete functions, but to provide users with suitable functions in specific scenarios, without requiring users to think too much. The theory is simple, but it is often not easy to achieve such an effect, so you can think from the following perspectives.
Is the < hierarchy clear?
Is < overdecorated? Does < have proper white space?
<…
3. The product function/process design is simple and easy to accept
The purpose of enterprises to make products is to generate transactions and provide services between products and users, especially in the current economic downturn, the space for functional value mining has gradually peaked, and the value created by product process interaction has begun to become more and more important. For the following methods on simplifying the process, refer to the following.
< design a form that is easily understood and accepted by users;
< high-threshold products can be designed to guide newcomers;
Step-by-step guidance < complex operations;
< use smart defaults to reduce cognitive costs
<…
4. Make the difference between the main and minor elements
As long as there is information, it will inevitably cause cognitive biases, and without the right guidance, it will often cause users to reverse priorities. For how to create the difference between the main and secondary elements, distinguish > visual effects such as color and >.
2. Application of classical psychological theories
1. Classical Gestalt Theory and its Derivative Methods
Gestalt theory emerged in Germany in the early 20th century and is a psychological principle that describes human cognitive processes.
It probably means that when the human brain processes information, it will be accustomed to processing and cognition in the simplest way. For example, by using numbers to show the monthly turnover of a business and graphs to show the turnover, users can judge trends more quickly with images with less information.
And this theory has also derived a series of > similarities, proximity > and so on, which are all classic design theories.
2. Concurrent design
Concurrent design theory is an important concept in design psychology that refers to the tendency of the human eye to see parallel factors as more correlated than other factors. This principle is often used to classify two different sets of content on the same page.
3. The bait effect
It means that when the user chooses a relatively difficult choice, a new option (bait) will be added to make it more attractive to an old option. The classic case is a variety of membership software, usually the main role of the membership of the season card is to dispel the user's hesitation between the monthly card and the annual card. Including Starbucks' mid-cup, big-cup, and extra-jumbo cup mechanics.
As well as the subsequent development of various full-reduction baits on takeaway platforms, they are all design cases of the bait effect.
4. Anchoring effect
The anchoring effect refers to the fact that when people need to evaluate an event, they will use certain values as the starting value to evaluate and measure the decision.
The classic case is the original price mechanism of various e-commerce platforms, which takes the original price as the starting value of user psychology and strengthens the user's purchase mind through preferential prices.
III. Finally
It's not easy to do a good job in product design, the key is how to get close to and understand the real intention of users. The above method summary can quickly provide you with some thinking and direction in your work, if you want to truly master theoretical knowledge, practice is essential, and this sharing is here.
Author: Urban Ferryman, Public Account: Urban Ferryman
This article was originally published by @都市摆渡人 on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without the permission of the author is prohibited
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