Incremental changes to a mediocre product, will end in its demise

Product design is becoming more of an intensely fierce and competitive production. We’re living in a world today where there are thousands of small, agile companies with the single focused aim of being ‘disruptive players’within their dedicated industry.

Ultimately, in order to come even close to this competition when it comes to their alternative, fast and experimental user experience; you need a solid, cohesive, collaborative design team enrolled in a culture of transparency, ideation and experimentation.

By that statement, I’m not referring to just designing crazy experimental things, but getting intimate regarding your competitor and market research; understanding your industry in acute detail — finding all sorts of problems and solving them comprehensively. Not necessarily for quick and fast profit but for authority, market ownership and most of all: customer loyalty.

We’ve all seen what happens when companies do that, right? AirBnB, Google, Monzo; they’re all companies who have design embedded within the companies DNA. What do they have in common? They all have fiercely loyal users and a kick arse product(s), which evolve around their users needs.

These companies are pumping out ideas quicker than the combination most of their competitors. If you work in a large company, building a design team which can do this shouldn’t just be a priority, it should be a necessity to survive the coming ages.

The fundamental difference between the companies mentioned above is that they would never identify themselves as “tech companies” they would internally define themselves as: “user experience companies”. They understand they’re not building products for the sake of technology, but for the users who use it.

Product owners and designers, working on consumer facing platforms which only push for slow incremental changes to an under performing product, will ultimately find themselves struggling to compete.

Why spend 2 months animating a hamburger icon when the fundamental core aspects of your product is failing against its competitors?

Automated multivariate testing is perfect for aggressive and sporadic experimental UX changes. Flip things upside down. Move things around. Be creative. Be quick, fast, nimble. Don’t be afraid to test things in quick succession. Move with the times.

Of course, designers can only move as fast as the technology infrastructure allows and most importantly; this kind of approach should be done in conjunction with company-wide objectives, and cooperatively across the entire product team.

Here’s a quick example: Twitter. They’ve taken over 8 years to make 7 changes to their navigation structure. Facebook were running over 54 A/B tests of their navigation experience in 2017…

Don’t wait for your product to get lost in a whirl-wind of excruciatingly tiny, non-automated time consuming changes, before realising you’re so far behind your competitors that your only strategy of defence is introducing a rather expensive, non-agile cumbersome ‘refresh’ (or something of the sort!)

Thank you for checking out this blog. You can see more of my work on my website, darceybeau.co.uk, or my Dribbble profile, or my Behance profile. You can email me about working together at info@darceybeau.co.uk You can also follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Unsplash. Have a great day!