Why Product Design

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>> Why does product design matter? Why is this such an important area that has become such a growth area, and so many people are starting to say, hey, I'm a product designer now, right? Well, it's because product design, not dissimilar to UX design really, has a big impact on the success or failure of any web app, right?

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So, product design, for example, is incredibly important in customer acquisition. An easy-to-use web app that allows people to solve a real pain point will grow organically. And before you think, yeah, but I work on web apps internally within organizations, right? So therefore, everybody has to use it, no they don't, right?

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People are the number of times if there's a quicker and easier way that circumvents your bit of software because your bit of software sucks. People will use that alternative approach, okay, and I see this again and again. Intranets are the best example of this ever, intranets is where content goes to die, right?

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Because nobody likes their intranet. It's always some bit of software that has been developed with little or no thought to the user experience. So, product design can really help with customer acquisition is also really valuable when it comes to customer retention, right? So, keeping people using that app, right?

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If people build up a procedural knowledge of how to use it, how to get something done in that app, then they can be very hesitant and reluctant to move to another app. And actually, Figma is a great example of this, right? So, we've got, well, we used to have Adobe XD, although I believe that's Rest in Peace now, if I'm right.

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So, you used to have Adobe XD. Today we we've got sketch and we've got Figma the probably the word the big three, right, and don't get angry me yes, there are other options available. But those are tend to be the big three. But for a longest time I used to use sketch and Figma became superior to sketch for a long time and I kind of knew it was, that it had features that were better, but I couldn't be asked.

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I couldn't be asked to learn a new platform, a new bit of software. And that's because the product design on Sketch was good enough, right, it was great. It did what I wanted it to. Okay, I didn't have all the features of Figma, but I knew how it worked, and I was comfortable with it that, so product design kept me on Sketch for a long time, even though the other product was superior in terms of functionality, interesting.

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And the other reason why product design can be so invaluable is cuz of cost savings. Now, this is a little bit of a surprising one because it kinda comes out in lots of different ways. So certainly, the most obvious example of this is if it's an internal app.

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And for those people that have seen my user research and testing workshop, I apologize because I'm gonna use exactly the same analogy of story that I used on that. But I remember a time my long-suffering wife, right? I went out for lunch with my long-suffering wife, and she knows what I'm like.

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And we went to a restaurant called Pizza Express which is a chain restaurant in the UK. And the lady came to take our order and she was tapping away on a her basically in house app to place the order. And I started to think it's taken a long time, right?

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And I looked at my wife and she knew exactly what I was thinking rolled her eyes that disgust at me that and so I started mentally counting how long it was taking her to place this order, right? And so, the minute the waitress went away, my wife said to me, go on then get it outta your system, and I said, right, okay.

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If that took 10 seconds extra, if I could squeeze off 10 seconds from that, the length of time it took to do that. And if they do 10 seconds per order, average of 4 orders per table times by, let's guess a x number of sittings in this particular restaurant per day.

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And then I got my phone out and looked up on Wikipedia how many restaurants they've got around the around the world or at times that, that's how much per day. 10 seconds per day, average salary value of a waiter your minimum wage I could save Pizza Express 1.2 million a year in salary bills by improving this app by 10 seconds, right?

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I've made that 1.2 million up, it wasn't that high. But that is the power of product design is being able to do that. But also there can be cost savings in other ways. Those first two things, the customer acquisition, a customer, attention. Do you know the amount it costs to acquire a new customer?

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Right, it's incredibly high, so if we can keep the customers with good product design that's far better.