The document discusses a customer-centric approach to product design, emphasizing that delightful products should exceed user expectations and bring joy. It highlights the importance of collaboration within cross-functional teams, effective communication, and iterative design processes to address user pain points. Techniques such as field studies, persona development, and continuous usability testing are recommended to ensure products evolve based on user feedback.

1. Building Delightful Products:
A Customer Centric Approach to Design
Christine Perfetti @cperfetti

2. What makes the best teams
successful?

3. Methodology Process Techniques Tricks

4. What is a delightful product?
What makes a delightful product?
Gives users great pleasure and joy
Delivers value and benefit that accomplishes users’ goals
and goes beyond their basic expectations
• What it’s not:
• A magic bullet
• Bells and whistles
• Sizzle or sexiness

6. Janet Seitz has 2 dogs
and 2 cats

7. A brilliant team of designers created the BlackBerry PlayBook
Offered multitasking and capability to view Flash

16. What went wrong?

17. It’s not about the big idea
The big mistakes organizations make: believing a
magically brilliant idea will lead to delightful
solutions
The best products aren’t created (or built) by one
brilliant person or team
Success comes from:
Teams stumbling and constructively failing
An organization and culture that celebrates
collaboration and openness
Ongoing iteration and learning

18. Effective Techniques for Building
Delightful Products

19. What are the different components
of your product?

20. Focus on the Holistic View of
Your Product

21. Who should be on the product
team?
Product management
Engineering
UX
Marketing
Support
Legal
Sales

22. Involve all members of the
cross-functional team

24. Biggest contributor to design
problems
A member of the product team did
not communicate all of their
knowledge with the rest of the team

25. Hire the right people

26. Core value: We are open and inclusive
Core design competencies
Team player
Collaborative
Listen to others’ constraints
Immersed in the user research
Understand the user problem

27. Communication is a core
design competency

29. “The most important baseline skill for any position is communication. We want you to be
able to explain what you mean; we want you to be articulate. That cuts out a lot of
people, because a lot of people are probably pretty good technically, but if you don’t
have excellent communication skills it’s going to be very frustrating for you and for other
people. Other than that, then there’s just a core set of skills for the position.”
- Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote

30. Start with the problem,
not the solution

31. Understand your users’ pain points

32. Involve all members of the team

33. Start with field studies
A field study is the best technique for gathering
information about users’ goals, needs, desires,
and motivations
What we learn
User frustration and problems
How technology fits into users’ life
Understanding of users’ goals and most important
tasks

34. What to look for
Understanding of work environment
Tasks that users haven’t talked about
Pain points and user frustration
“Cheat sheets”
Evidence of technology that isn’t working for the
user

35. Understand the user
workflow and frustration

36. It’s about the experience, not the
features

37. Focus on the user’s journey
Observe your users’ workflow in a realistic way
Identify the frustration and pain points
Tackle the problem areas
Don’t redesign everything all at once
Chunk the work

38. The 7-11 Milk Experiment

39. Compelled Shopping Study
Mirrors the 7-11 Milk Experiment
Closely approximately a realistic scenario
Allows us to assess the usability of our designs
and identify the pain points

53. The Journey Map

54. Incrementally improve and evolve
your designs
Massive redesigns inevitably fail
The best teams tackle create delightful designs
by evolving over time and incrementally
improving
Identify problem areas
Tackle the problems in chunks
Incrementally measure and learn
Iterate quickly
Collaborate on a cross-functional, internal team

55. Communicate user needs
throughout the organization

56. Personas
Profile of an archetypal user synthesized from
interviews
Prevents grounding by team
Takes advantage of the power of storytelling and
role playing
Communicates user needs throughout the
organization

57. The benefits
Prevents grounding by team
Takes advantage of the power of storytelling and
role playing
Communicates user needs throughout the
organization

60. Generate multiple product
concepts and designs

61. Design Studio
Two-day collaborative workshop with key
representation from Engineering, Marketing,
Product, UX, Customer Support, Sales
Present problem to tackle
Teams design in short time boxes
Present concepts
Critique
Iterate: Lather, rinse, repeat

63. Build measure, and
learn quickly

65. Iterations
What is the shortest amount of time
you can go through an iteration?

66. Usability test in an ongoing way
A usability test involves
putting your users in
front of your product
and observing what
they do

67. Start testing
anywhere

68. Testing Can Be Quick
Quick and dirty technique for measuring
content pages
Takes less than 10 minutes to run
Measures if content pages quickly convey
their purpose

69. Sharing Your Pictures Online
You want to post pictures online from your last
vacation
You are concerned that the upload process will
be difficult
How confident are you that you can upload
photos quickly and easily?

72. Sharing Your Pictures Online
You want to post pictures online from your last
vacation
You are concerned that the upload process will
be difficult
How confident are you that you can upload
photos quickly and easily?

75. Sharing Your Pictures Online
You want to post pictures online from your last
vacation
You are concerned that the upload process will
be difficult
How confident are you that you can upload
photos quickly and easily?

78. Relentlessly focus on
incremental improvements

79. Effective Techniques for Building
Delightful Products (1)
Focus on techniques and tricks
Achieve delight by delivering value beyond users’
expectations
Take a holistic view of your product
Involve all members of your cross-functional team
early and often
Hire designers who value teamwork and
collaboration

80. Effective Techniques for Building
Delightful Products (2)
Start with the problems, not the solutions
Map out your users’ workflow
Communicate users needs through personas
Generate multiple product concepts through real-
time collaboration techniques
Build quickly
Test, test, test: Incremental improvements will lead
to user delight

81. Thank You!
Twitter @cperfetti
cperfetti@carbonite.com