Why your product design can cost customers

I lost the count, how many times I did it: standing like an idiot in front of the door with a handle shouting “pull me!” While a small sign says “Push”. We all have. Don NormanThe legend of the user’s experience (UX), it meant A “Norman door“: The project is so bad that it needs instructions for use.

And I’m here to inform you: your product can be a normal door.

In the years as a product manager, from Enterprise to software for small corporations, I used to be conducive to watching how users struggle with prototypes that my team swore that they were intuitive. This door problem is not an abstract design theory. It is a product disease that bleeds the conversion rate.

Affordans is not only a design jargon

When for the first time I learned about afforders, visual suggestions showing how something works, it seemed that fluff at the design school. Then I observed a user test in which individuals couldn’t find our “obviously placed” recording button, and suddenly Don Norman didn’t seem so theoretical.

Take the original Robinhood interface. While the dinosaurs of brokerage houses buried users in vast web sites, Robinhood undressed investing in their vital things: up means good, green equal money, moving to motion. It wasn’t just “easier”. Basically, they modified, who wanted to take a position, making actions obvious.

Error product managers and teams commit themselves. Most of the products make sense if you build it and you already know how it really works. But customers only have what is before them, and it should be intuitive.

Your clients are at all times right

When users are struggling with your product, they are tempting with their fault. “They didn’t read the instructions.” “They need training.” “Not our perfect customer personality.”

This is a version of the striking product “pushing” on the door with a handle. Good design does not require instructions.

Bad news about mistakes is my personal peeve here. Many are written by programmers for programmers: “Error code 5432: Exception of the zero indicator in transaction service”. Great, helpful.

HCI Research (and common sense) shows that effective error messages must explain what happened in human language, explain the consequences and suggest repair. When Slack says: “You try to send a file larger than 50 MB” and immediately suggests “try to compress it or use our Google Dysu integration”, they prevent rage, which I have seen too many times in utility tests.

Restrictions as a business strategy

Industry designers intentionally use restrictions – for example, how the SIM card suits only in one way (although I still misunderstood it every time). Product restrictions are not restrictions; These are clarity engines. The most successful products I worked with, limiting options to stop catastrophic mistakes and an empty view of cognitive overload.

Look how Figma introduced the design tool space. Instead of attempting to press in each function of Adobe amassed since 1990, they limited their tool to basic interface design elements. They deliberately avoided the effects of complex layers in favor of trouble -free cooperation. I watched how countless designers pass when they realized that these “restrictions” actually dramatically accelerated the flow of labor.

For your company (and mine), this implies absolutely killing functions that do not confirm your basic value. Functions that do not equalize can actively undermine your UX.

A return loop that actually matters

Don Norman’s “Bay of Assessment” – the difference between what users expect and what is happening – applies to each quarterly business reviews and to the flow of money.

When the user takes motion in your product, how quickly he knows, did it work? If the answer is: “They must check e -mail” or “they learn later”, you created a rating that can sink the user’s confidence.

I used to be guilty of that. My team once built a “immediate” data export function, which actually took 30 seconds – with zero feedback during processing. Users’ testing revealed that individuals clicked the button 5-6 times, pondering that it was broken. We added a progress bar, and users are waiting patiently now.

Amazon mastered this using one click order. When you touch “Buy now”, you get confirmation that your order is processed. It solves uncertainty that kills conversion rates.

In the case of product strategy, this implies investing as much in states confirming as the development of features. Users remember uncertainty greater than remember your list of functions.

Apply these rules now

These HCI rules are practical business tools that I exploit every day. Here’s easy methods to use them immediately:

1. Find “Norman door”, watching recent users interact without help (and rely on the desire to clarify when they are fighting)

2. Map the entire journey of the user, marking every moment of confusion or surprise

3. Review of error states with the same rigor that you just use to develop the function (seriously, audit all of them)

4. Rate the function demands for basic restrictions as an alternative of automatic adding them to the backlog

The products that win are not the ones that have the most functions or the most sensible technology. They clearly communicate, prevent errors with grace and immediately provide feedback. It’s a door that you just know about easy methods to open the first time.

Although, to be honest, these producers of “Push” and “Pull” signs are probably doing well. There is at all times money in a bad project.