PerfectMarket

Interactive Simulations: The Key to Successful Product Design

When it comes to software design, success or failure can be entirely dictated by ease of use and simplicity of design.  Just like with real life face-to-face interactions, first impressions are lasting impressions.  Wowing your customers with design, simplicity, intelligence, and speed is critical in driving usability and adoption of your product. 

Often when people talk about product design, they think color palette, fonts, and page layout.  However, product design extends far beyond that and tackles much more complex matters in order to address a host of use cases and scenarios.

Let’s take a seemingly simple task like creating a new member for a web-based application.  What are some things that need to be taken into consideration when working through the design?

1. What is the fastest way to help the user complete the task at hand?  What is the most intuitive way?   What is most consistent with the rest of the application?  What if these goals are conflicting?
2. What devices, browsers, and operating systems does this design need to accommodate?
3. When designing an entry form, is it best to HIDE or DISABLE components that are either a) not available to this particular user or b) dependent upon another selection value?
4. What is the best way to indicate required fields?
5. How best to handle form validation?  Upon field entry, upon form submission, or somehow else?
6. When is it appropriate to include informational text?  Will people read it?  If help text is necessary, does that imply the design is not self-explanatory?
7. What kind of language should be used to clearly articulate what you want the end user to do?  Professional or more casual?  Generic terminology or industry-specific jargon?
8. Should we apply widgets, toolkits, and languages that are optimized for the most advanced browsers on the market?  Or should the experience be “dumbed down” somewhat to accommodate a larger range of web browsers?
9. Will a portion of the user base have any handicaps such as poor eyesight or hearing impairments that need to be factored into the design
10. Is this a page that will be accessed from multiple device types and sizes?  If so, how will you modify the design and flow accordingly
11. Will different user types have different access that needs to be factored into the design?

So, what is the best way to illustrate the requirements and design the product in a way that addresses all of the above complex matters? In my experience, the answer is to create interactive simulations.  In my 11+ years of product management experience, I have written hundreds of PRDs (Product Requirement Documents, a standard approach to explain what a product should do at enough detail so that engineers can build from it) and creating hundreds of static screenshots to visually illustrate the workflow.  And no matter how detailed the requirements and designs were, almost every time something feel through the cracks, either because it was missed in the design, or it got lost in translation when handed over to engineering.

This was until I started using iRise, a visualization tool that allows me to simulate an entire workflow process from start to finish.  By using iRise Studio to create and test simulations, I (and other reviewers) am better equipped to catch edge cases that I may have otherwise missed. 

Not only does iRise help tighten up the product design, but it also assists in translating those design requirements to engineering.  Written requirements are still needed, but the visual simulations provide much added value.  Often the simulations and end product are so identical, it’s hard to tell which is which! 

To date, creating simulations has proven to be a very helpful component of the product design process. These interactive simulations have helped:

1. Reduce noise and confusion around design requirements
2. Ease sales cycles and get client approvals
3. Decrease the amount of engineering rework
4. Standardize internal processes

Going forward, as Perfect Market fully applies responsive publishing in our designs (like the Boston Globe recently did), simulating experiences on different devices and screen sizes will become even more pertinent to the product definition and design processes.

Tags: design,