Need You Look at a Product Design to Evaluate It?

Understandably, anyone from a technical architect to the CEO might want to look at a product or “play with it” to evaluate it. However, it doesn’t make sense when you stop and think about it momentarily. If they hate it, yet every customer loves it (and wants to pay for it), it’s a great product for both the customer and the business. While it is unrealistic to be this extreme, there are opportunities to reframe your approach:

• Determine the key business and experience metrics upfront and use them for evaluation, not internal design reviews.
• Get the organization familiar with using artifacts like personas. It encourages internal people who review the product to look at it from a customer/user perspective.
• Bring the idea of “it doesn’t matter what we think, it’s what the customer thinks” to the beginning of the project, not halfway through.
• When using internal design reviews, learn how to weigh the feedback. Are the comments connected to the user research, or are they personal preferences?
• When you get a project/product that does this and is successful, then make sure you include the above as part of the story for success. People like to copy success.