Learning Product Design: My experience

I couldn’t sleep during the week, been having slight insomnia for sometime now but it actually has helped me catch up on a lot self learning goals I set out to achieve earlier in the year.

So, in one of those sleepless night I decided to start my Udacity course on product design.

It was totally worth my being awake, I spent 2 hours listening and brainstorming on entrepreneurship and ideation.

The course instructors are 2 very talented men that I believe work with Google.

For a start they made me understand that a product needs to make money and the people who pay for the product will only pay if there is some sort of value attached to the product. In order words the product needs to solve a problem for the user, the value of the product will be found in it’s solution.

The instructors interviewed co-founders of optimizely and locket.

One striking thing about them was that they had both failed but were both determined to actually build products that added value to their target user.

Locket started with displaying ads on user home screens, they were actually giving value to ad agencies rather than the owner of the home screen which was the primary user.

Locker had excess users but not enough money to maintain the traffic and they failed along the way but they pivoted and iterated to a product that actually gave value to the owner of the home screen: news and stories.

The CTO of optimisely and his cofounder said they had failed in 2 startups before that one and it was because they were building solutions before identifying problems.

They actually got revenue before building optimisely and that was because the user paid in advance for value.

These stories got me hooked on the course and I have completed more than 50% of week 1 in just one night because of how interesting every section of the course is.

The entrepreneurs made me understand that a product is only viable if it’s useable and valuable to the user or customer.

So product design looks at the user as a consumer and customer.

Another interesting part about the course was when one of the instructors raised a point that it’s best to build solutions to problems you and the people around you face. It made me ask the question:

Would I buy my own product?

I have built businesses in the past and the best performers were the ones I could and would consume. Being the producer and consumer made me understand how best to sell it and I came to understand that the worst performers were the ones I expected others to pay for.

In design one very important term you’ll hear is empathy. But how can you be empathetic with a product you cannot consume?

Every product designer should have the mind and heart of an entrepreneurial which is the obsessive and aggressive zeal to make the product work.

With me there is no giving up, after all product design is an iterative process.

I look forward to sharing more with you.