The Circle of Product Design
I am a problem solver by nature so I find myself constantly using products and going “wow, if they had just done this, this would have been a great product” whether because it would make it work better to meet needs, make it less frustrating to use, or more intuitive. All of these things I believe play into the emotional response you have to a product. The easier it is to use or the more likely it is to meet your needs equals more satisfaction, more likely to have positive feelings about the product, the more likely to use the product and become part of your routine, the more likely you are to share with others what you love about the product. It’s circular. As a product designer, I think that’s what you should strive for.
It means thinking about the products you create from every angle, not just the one in front of you. You have to fully think through, from beginning to end, how or who will use the product.
I love technology and I LOVE how the use of technology can solve so many problems or issues in my life. As an example, my new obsession is a cookbook app I recently downloaded. It solved so many problems for me. I have paper recipes all over the place but I struggle with deciding what to make for dinner because it’s not easy to search through them all because sometimes I only have a certain protein on hand or I might only have a certain amount of time or it’s the weekend and I want to make a more complicated recipe that I don’t have time to do during the week. Whatever it is, I have no way to search my paper recipes except to laboriously flip through them all and I just don’t have time to look through all the recipes ☹. I have tried numerous methods to catalog them but to no avail.
I test drove numerous cookbook recipe manager apps before I settled on The Cookbook App. Along with all it’s great features and ease of use, what won it over for me was its tagging system. Other systems strictly had folders but I like the tags, not just because I can search by tags but because when I open the recipe, I can quickly scan the tags I have created and I see everything I found important about that recipe. For example, I might get a chicken recipe from my search and when I open the recipe, I notice my tag says “complicated” so I know I don’t want to do that one tonight — I can find that out without having to review the recipe which I find time saving and helpful.
For as much as I love this app and the problems it solved, a few little tweaks would have taken this from a “good” product to a “great” product if the developers would have thought about the product from a “cooking” perspective — as in, how will this product actually be used.
For example, every cookbook app has a place to input “prep time” and “cook time”. What’s missing is “marinade time”. My biggest frustration with cooking is when I go to make a recipe for dinner and I realize at 6pm that I had forgotten that I was supposed to marinate for 8 hours… $#*! — you get the picture. If the developers had added a “marinade” time field and tied it in to creating a notification to pop up, home cooks around the globe would rejoice! An additional frustration is when you are making two recipes at once, say a main and a side dish and you need the recipe for both. The app developers made it where you could add accompanying recipes to “the plan”, but you have to come out of your current recipe and go back to the planning area to go into the other recipe. Linking those with a split screen would have solved that issue.
While storing recipes is great, at the end of the day you need to be able to use the recipes. If the developers had thought about how the product would actually be used from a “doing” perspective, from the perspective of you actually want to cook using the recipes, this would move the needle to “great” — thinking such as this makes your product becomes indispensable, something that makes you happy to use, and something you want to share with others. It creates the circle.
