What is failed product design?
Knowing if your product design has failed does not require any research or study. Making it right in the first place or doing course correction requires it.
When it fails, users and numbers scream the flaws and inefficiencies out loud at you. And all you can do is listen carefully, leave the ego aside, and make corrections.
Why am I telling this at the beginning?
Usually, whenever I refer to failed product designs, the discussion that follows almost always turns into a barrage of subjective opinion-sharing.
Product design is a layered multi-step process that involves collective effort from several individuals and requires decision-making that isn't always driven by data. And then there are operational, motivational, market, and several other challenges that affect the final product in several ways.
To get it right requires a lot of work. Research and requirements, designing and architecting, development and QA, and personal efforts and experience of individuals involved, all come together in an attempt to deliver a nuanced quality product.
Each stage requires sufficient checkpoints to ensure nothing goes wrong. And everything depends on the competency of processes and individuals involved. When you see it as a whole, it really is an adventure. If it goes right, you get to work on a new adventure. If it doesn't, you get to work the right way on the same adventure.
Now going back to what wrote in the beginning, if your product design fails, users and numbers scream the flaws and inefficiencies out loud at you. In such situations, I don't see a point in opinion-sharing. I believe that data and real user experiences are enough to tell the story.
So what exactly is a failed design? Not getting into the subjective explanations or opinions, on a broad level, a failed design is one that leads to one or more of the following issues.
I have clubbed each issue with two sub-points:
- Symptoms: What is happening that tells you something has failed.
- Where to look: Where should you be looking to make corrections.
Here we go:
1. Poor User Experience
The design is difficult to navigate, confusing, or frustrating and the user considers abandoning the flow due to a lack of user-friendliness.
- Symptoms: Low adoption and engagement, limited user base, and underutilization of the features.
- Where to look: UI/UX design.
2. Functional Issues
The design is filled with frequent bugs, crashes, or technical issues that hinder the functionality.
- Symptoms: High user frustration, loss of trust, increased number of support requests, and potential data loss or security risks.
- Where to look: Development and quality assurance (QA).
3. Misalignment with objectives
You spend a month modifying the flow to retain the users of a certain demographic and it leads to nothing. Worse, it leads to further abandonment. Simply put, the design does not serve the intended business or user objectives.
- Symptoms: KPIs plateauing or dropping, hearing demand for the same requirement post-delivery, missed targets, and several others that the guys with balance sheets will tell you!
- Where to look: Product strategy and requirements gathering.
4. Lack of Scalability
The design cannot adapt to changing user needs or accommodate growth, especially in the long term. Each minor change requires moving several pieces and redeveloping several items.
- Symptoms: Limited software lifespan, high maintenance costs, consistent reworks, and inability to serve a growing user base.
- Where to look: Architectural design and development planning.
5. Security Vulnerabilities
The design compromises the security of user data or the system itself and exposes users and organizations to potential harm. Each pre-prod leads to concerns of vulnerability checks and demands additional work, compromises, and delays in delivery.
- Symptoms: Data breaches, legal issues, and user trust erosion—evident in a variety of ways.
- Where to look: Security measures and architecture.
6. Inefficiency
You delivered everything that was asked for. You did it on time. All seems good. But then, as the user count saw a jump, the system failed. Why? The design is overly complex, slow, or resource-intensive and doesn't meet performance expectations.
- Symptoms: Sluggish user experience, higher resource usage, and decreased user satisfaction.
- Where to look: Code optimization, performance tuning, and architectural improvements.
These are some of the major issues that tell the story by themselves and often are self-evident either in numbers or the feedback.
Most product deployments will face these issues. The better the processes and people the lesser the issues. Good news is that you can fix them. Many have done it in the past and so can you.
If you need helping fixing these, I am open for consultation. Reach out to me at abhi2428063@gmail.com.