Top 10 UX advise for a product

These are the top 10 UX principles to build the product. UX means the overall user experience from the time a user visits your website to understand your company, to becoming a delighted customer.

These were the principles used by Marketo to build their product, as per their VP of products. I believe that Marketo is a great company because I like their sales, pre-sales, founder, VP of products, product manager, and pretty much everyone who works there.

It is definitely one of the fastest growing companies in San Mateo. That’s saying a lot as there are, on an average, 25 great companies on each block in the Silicon Valley.

Back to the best UX principles:

• User research: don’t focus on focus groups alone. That’s the first group thing Steve Jobs fired when he took over to make Apple most valuable company in the world. Watch & observe as to what customers do and how they try to address each of the elements in the UX cycle. For instance, if your customers like to watch video datasheets more than PPTs, your sales cycle should be focused around generating and marketing videos.
• Users don’t read: Some of the awesome products don’t come with user-guide. I didn’t read user-guide when I bought Audi. So, however tempting assume that your customers don’t like to read and design your system based around this hypothesis.
• Which is better?: go for large number of small features as opposed to one big feature. Many researches have proved this theory. However, it is product dependent.
• Remove system friction: Kindle to buy books, Apple AppStore to buy apps. You get it! Remove unnecessary steps in the UX cycle.
• Fire Fighting: Your company is judged by how you handle when things go wrong. So carry this fire drill often and improve on it.
• Global: your UX cycle should be global and neutral. Talking about ‘freeways’ and ‘quaterbacks’ may not make sense outside of US
• Don’t bend users: Users should never change anything to get adjusted to products. The product should align with the norm. Think of frustration when indicator is swapped with wiper blades when you rent a cheap car.
• Deliver great functionality: Details decide whether it is a great functionality or not. Go through every possible use-case while building that functionality.
• Don’t be risk-averse: No risk – no gain. Look for places to take risk and experiment.
• Fun to deal with: Ultimately this decides whether you customers like your product or not. Be a fun company and product to deal with. Don’t be up tight and over-sophisticated as a company.

Let’s go and build some great products…