Value in UX: Anticipating and Meeting User Needs

The third part of a three-part series explores the difference between good and bad UX, measured by key factors including usability, aesthetics, and value. In this final article, we'll examine the role of value.

While usability and aesthetics are important, a truly valuable user experience goes beyond that. It should address a user's pain point or need, giving them a reason to use the product. Typical examples of poor value include missing features, lack of robustness to stand alone as a product, or lack of product market fit.

Product market fit refers to ensuring your product has a market. Products that don’t have a good fit in the marketplace won’t be successful. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to find out if the product will be successful by creating a hypothesis to test your designs through prototypes.

As a side note, everyone creating a product is creating design. Whether or not it's an intentional or well-thought out design is a different problem. Everything is designed, even if a designer didn't design it. Anyone creating a software product, app, or web-based product should be thinking about design, flow, and general interaction. Prototypes will help gather feedback on the product idea, and how the product works.

The term product/market fit describes the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its product. - Eric Ries

Prototypes provide flexibility to iterate through different designs and interaction models with the target customer. Prototyping helps to validate different solutions and verify pain points and unmet needs for the product. Prototyping is inexpensive, as you can use anything from a single sketch or image, Figma prototype, or even a presentation software like Keynote or PowerPoint to test an idea.

However, in practice, some companies run into problems when they release products too early or haven’t validated their minimum viable product (MVP) in order to release quickly.

Threads MVP

Let's examine the Threads product launch from Meta[1] as an example of how value and utility influence user experience. Upon its launch, Threads acquired over 100 million users, generating a lot of excitement.

However, the momentum came to a screeching halt over the following weeks. The lack of search and a desktop app contributed to a significant loss of engagement. In this case, the MVP was missing key functionality, and couldn’t keep up with the momentum and excitement of the launch.

When companies are focused on shipping, sometimes key functionality gets missed. In this case, it seems that search was a critical feature for the initial launch. In fact, a recent study by PWC indicates that social media is used to research before purchasing and to learn about different product offerings.

As Threads has continued to invest in it's product offering, it's daily active users continues to climb. For a big brand like Meta, having a few missteps for launch isn't great, but it won't necessarily harm them over time. However, for new products it can be catastrophic.

Honing on the right features to launch isn't as easy as it seems. It requires listening to your ideal customers and deciphering whether some features are needed right away or can be pushed to a later date. Sometimes, it's important to get products to market quickly, but prioritizing the key feature set is critical to adoption.

In a project I worked on, a very large list of information that would show up after a search, and it was clear that the product needed filters to reduce the results list. Unfortunately, a product manager overruled the filters without considering user behavior as an MVP feature, and sure enough, customers were asking for filters to deal with unwieldy information.

Determining what should be in the MVP is sometimes an art and a science, but you can reduce risk by understanding your customers.

If a product isn’t valuable or lacks utility people need, they simply won’t use it and the experience will lose customers over time.

InVision App

InVision was a highly used prototyping app and, at one time, the market leader in prototyping, valued at $2B[2]. However, it recently announced it would shut down in December 2024.

InVision was excellent for very simple prototyping. It addressed a clear pain point in the market- easy prototyping with the ability to gather feedback and collaborate around a design. Prior to InVision, it wasn’t very easy to get feedback on design unless you sent a file to someone or walked someone through the design more directly.

It was designed for click-throughs using hotspots. The workflow for InVision was to use Sketch or another app to design wireframes and import the designs into InVision. In the time that InVision became popular, using two different apps, one to create wireframes and another for prototyping was normal. 

The key feature that made InVision popular was the commenting and collaboration feature. It was very easy to create a prototype and collect feedback and comments on the design. No need to install software or send unwieldy documents or images to separate team members.

However, over time, InVision focused on features that were not core to its prototype offering, and Figma arrived. In 2016, Figma came to market as a fully functional wireframing product offering a browser-based collaborative design workflow.

The following year, Figma’s prototyping mode was introduced, allowing designers to design and prototype using the same tool[3]. Instead of using Sketch to wireframe, and InVision to prototype, there was one tool that combined both activities. In addition, Sketch, which was the popular wireframing tool was only available on a Mac, leaving out Windows users.

Figma’s features were a game changer, in my opinion. No one really wants to do multiple things with multiple tools.  Figma offered cross-browser capabilities, prototyping, and design using the same tool.

Figma’s solution solved multiple pain points and addressed unmet needs. Figma allowed the prototype creation within the same file, and it was cross-platform for Windows users. It also included a commenting feature in parity with the InVision collaboration model.

InVision suddenly had a limited use case with limited value. It didn’t take long for design organizations to switch to Figma.

As a prominent InVision user, I noticed that tools and workflows evolved, but InVision didn’t—at least not at the pace that the rest of the world was moving. While no one factor contributed to InVision’s downfall, it’s clear that it’s value proposition over time waned with its core user base.

In summary, value is critical to user experience because people won’t have a reason to use the product without it. Good UX always brings value to the user.

Design helps create value

User experience and design play a critical role in whether a product will be successful. In fact, according to Statista, a few key reasons why startups fail include lack of demand for product, and product not being user friendly[4].

When Startup founders were surveyed on what they wish they could have done differently, 58% said they would spend more time doing research prior to launch[5]. On top advice offered for aspiring founders, 56% said to listen to customers, and 54% said to ensure there’s a market for their product[6].

Before companies spend money on building a product, taking the time to validate the market will ensure that the product is addressing current pain points, or improving on current products. Assessing market need relies on reviewing data and trends within the market and interviewing potential customers.

When interviewing potential customers, you can include prototypes of the ideas and if something isn’t resonating with your target market, it’s easy to scrap the idea and start over, or add additional improvements based on the type of feedback customers are providing.

You might hear stories on how founders didn’t listen to their customers and still found success. That’s definitely possible, but also risky. With limited resources, taking risks can be expensive in both time and money and in the end, probably not worth it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, user experience (UX) encompasses usability, aesthetics, and value. A good UX ensures that users can navigate effortlessly, find value in interactions, and be delighted by the interface's aesthetics. By focusing on these critical elements, designers can create experiences that meet user needs and exceed their expectations.

Striving for simplicity and delivering value are the cornerstones of exceptional user experiences. Ensuring these factors are considered in the design experience will foster satisfaction and loyalty.

References

PwC. (n.d.). Consumer insights survey. PwC. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/consumer-markets/consumer-insights-survey.html

Chow, A. R. (2023, August 17). Meta's Threads Is Already Unraveling. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/6305383/meta-threads-failing/.

The Information. (n.d.). Design Startup InVision, Once Valued at $2B, Is Shutting Down. Retrieved from https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/design-startup-invision-once-valued-at-2b-is-shutting-down.

Figma Blog. (n.d.). Reflecting on Figma's First Year. Retrieved from https://www.figma.com/blog/reflecting-on-figmas-first-year/.

InVision. (2024, March 16). InVision design collaboration services shutdown. Inside Design Blog. Retrieved from https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/invision-design-collaboration-services-shutdown/.

Statista. (2022). Main reasons for start-ups going bankrupt globally 2022. Retrieved May 22, 2024, from [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271464/start-up-failure-reasons]

Skynova. (2023). Top reasons startups fail. Retrieved May 22, 2024, from https://www.skynova.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail.

Interesting Reads

First Round Review. (2024). Productboard's path to product-market fit. First Round Review. https://review.firstround.com/productboards-path-to-product-market-fit/

Andreessen Horowitz. (n.d.). 12 things about product-market fit. Andreessen Horowitz. https://a16z.com/12-things-about-product-market-fit/