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Software product may fail: it can enter the market and get lost among the competitors. It may happen that the product will stay outside the main business and bring its 10 cents hardly paying back the maintenance efforts. It may also happen that the software will boost the market, killing the competitors by the burst wave and get a toehold in the tops. |
In this series of articles I would like to cover 10 characteristics which, to my opinion, follow each successful software product whether it is Facebook, Kaspersky antivirus or Angry Birds.
Brief overview of previous series:
1. Your product is intended for specific people.
2. Your product helps people hit the target.
3. Your product solves a specific task.
4. Your product is very powerful but easy to learn.
5. Your product does what user expects.
6. Taking a product “in arms” brings pleasure
I think that if it brings pleasure to “take a product in arms” means you like working with it. We can say if we like or not one or another product in most cases, but sometimes we cannot say why exactly we like or don’t like it. Positive emotions from the work with a product is quite irrational thing, but not less important.
A product can be very powerful, have many features and solve many important tasks. But if it does not bring pleasure to a customer, most likely your customer will choose more “pleasant” product from his/her point of view.
I believe that what brings positive emotions are the pleasant and harmonic graphical design, well-elaborated design of interface and user interaction, reliability, predictability, easiness in learning and dozens of other aspects which “Captain Obvious” gladly tells you. Some part of them (like handy and intuitive UI) play the key role in irrational perception of a product and may deeply affect your user emotions.
Some specific feature of a product is often not so important as how it is presented to your customer in a product. For example, everybody knows that when a good system performs some time taking action it shows a progress bar or at least a throbber illustrating the process. Indeed, image the action that takes 10 seconds during which the application gives no signs of file and the same action that takes 20 seconds but with the gradually filling progress bar. It’s obvious that despite the second application shows twice less performance, it brings more positive emotions.
At first sight it seems that emotions a user gets when working with the application are impossible to evaluate and compare. Indeed, the emotions do not fit into customary rationally-logical area of numbers and relations. But it becomes clearer if we take advantage of psychologists experience, for example Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, an author of amazing Psychological theory of Flow.
You can learn the theory of Flow in details in his books, for example, this one. The main idea of his works is that people are happiest from creating something when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.
I will not go deeper in the flow in this article. I already wrote about this earlier. I just want to draw you attention to two aspects:
- To work in the ‘flow’, the task should not be too easy or too difficult
- Distracting a person from the task brings him/her out of the ‘flow’
And now about what it has to do with emotions which your product causes. It’s so simple: the easier the person working with your product goes into ‘flow’, the longer s/he stays there and the more positive emotions s/he gets.
Let’s consider several examples which negatively affect user’s ‘flow’.
- Very difficult task – a product requires constant efforts to work with it. Unknown processes, unclear tasks sequence, undefined work algorithm – all these things complicate the work and do not allow a user to focus and work in ‘flow’.
- Distraction – to work in ‘flow’, a user should not be distracted, but often the product itself becomes the source of distraction. Unhandy and not intuitive interface makes a user distract and search for options for make one or another thing. Badly elaborated graphic design distracts a user by inappropriate colors and forms. Long taking data loading makes a user think and worry whether the application hangs on, etc.
I am sure that we can provide dozens of similar examples. But what makes it important is that the longer a user stays in the ‘flow’ state working with your product, the more positive emotions s/he gets.
The state of “being in flow” is easy to trace and even estimated. And the relation of “being in flow” time to the overall time of working with a product can provide an approximate “index of positive emotions” when working with a product.
And this is how the “pleasure” can be estimated and this is a parameter that you can use when projecting and developing a successful software product.
