NOTE: This article is NOT for industry interaction design or product management veterans. It is written for web designers who are working with a small startup team (5 or 10 people) and are asked to also do some interaction design.
I’ve been designing web-based applications for about a decade. For better or worse, the early process is nearly always the same: design a home page that conveys the brand positioning, then design pages demonstrating core product functionality.
You borrow patterns from more successful products, if such a product exists. Working on a photo-sharing app? Design a page with 25 photos on it, with pagination, sorting and filtering, and the like. A social networking site? Start with a friend list showing your top 10 friends, a feed of recent posts by them, etc.
Often these designs become the functional specs for engineers to work from in building the system. You need to illustrate how all sorting permutations work, how pagination works if you have 51 items in your list, how to handle a long payments history page, and all of the important permutations that have engineering implications.
Hopefully you soon have a solid working version of the site. It is optimized for a very particular user. I’ve tried to come up with a visual to show where it fits in:
This user gets to the product by entering a URL or from a bookmark. They have a history - a few connections, some contributed content, maybe a transaction or two.
Unless you are working with an experienced or savvy founding team, however, it’s often overlooked by the entire team that you have just designed and built a system for a non-existing person. There are MILLIONS of people who could potentially want what you’ve designed…but frankly, there are probably 5 actual users (usually the company founders and the engineering team.)
I hereby declare that the product design direction you take here is critically important.
Looking back over 4 years of working web-app startups, the companies I worked with who gained real market traction (TripIt and Glassdoor, in particular) took one path, while other companies took a slightly different path. Going from zero to thousands of active users in a rather short time helped those 2 demonstrate a clear market opportunity for their specific product to investors, who in turn funded them to further build momentum.
Some companies I’ve worked with focus next on the middle right of the chart, designing powerful functionality for hard-core users. But in my experience, the special sauce is focusing on one of two different user experiences: the SEO-optimized experience, or the viral loop experience. For this post I’m discussing the former.
The SEO-optimized experience
If your product is related in any way to keywords that users search for with Google (or your search engine of choice), designing an experience around that engagement method is probably the smartest next step you can take as a designer.
Like this:
Two points about this approach:
- …these users are merely investigating your product (to determine if they need it, compare it to other products, and hopefully try it.)
- …they have no history to expose or manage on your product (no friends, posts, or comments, and an empty profile, if a social media site.)
Exactly how you determine if there is an actual market for your product is a different subject. But, at the very least, just keeping these facts in mind helps you and your team prioritize features and make smarter design decisions — I’ve worked with several startups who chose to design and build complex, powerful features for users they don’t even have, rather than focus on this much larger pool of potential users.
Here’s a real-world example of designing the interaction for these potential users who arrive from a search engine result. This is from Glassdoor, which I worked on with their very savvy team:
Here is how this approach looks to the end user:
- A potential user, unaware of the existence of Glassdoor, searches for any job title + the word “salary” (”interaction designer salaries”, for example.)
- A clearly formatted, obviously relevant search result comes up among the top search results.
- The user clicks the link, taking them to a Glassdoor page - a list of “Interaction Designer Salaries” with a salary range scale for job position.
- Wanting deeper data, the user clicks on a specific company or job title link for more information.
- The user is then presented with the call-to-action, in this case a request to post their salary or a job review.
Obviously there are many moving parts in this approach that have little to do with the interaction design, such as customer development, SEO optimization, engineering, measuring relevant metrics, and much much more. But when working with smaller and less experienced teams, thinking about these issues can help guide your decisions where there may be little other real guidance.
I don’t have a good seque for this, but I strongly everyone to check out the Lessons Learned blog of Eric Ries, which has inspired me greatly to share my experience with others through blogging.
Hopefully this has been informative and useful. Please comment - your feedback and suggestions for improving this are greatly appreciated.
