Product design plays a major role in unified communications. Often conversations around UC focus on the underlying technology, which of course is extremely important. However, product design is not only a key factor in UC but it optimises the UCaaS experience and technology. “You can have the coolest technology, biggest feature-sets, and slickest marketing but if people can’t understand how to use your products, or the if the level of effort involved in learning how to use them is too high, your business is not headed for success,” says 2600Hz Lead Product Designer, Josh Sanders.
“You miss out on large-scale user-adoption because your products are difficult to use. If people can’t use your products, you don’t make money—your business can’t grow. Essentially, product design is an integration of different methodologies and tools to create intuitive and useful solutions that solve for experience deficiencies”
Customers need to feel like they can easily engage with products and that features are robust and flexible. Otherwise, they will search for other options and products that better serves their needs. This is where product design becomes a key factor for business success. Good product design makes it easier to identify and understand an organisation’s target demographic’s needs and allows for better products/services that meet those needs.
The 2600Hz Approach to Product design
Product design is a fairly broad term and covers a range of disciplines and touchpoints throughout the product creation process. The levels from conception to deployments can become quite detailed, but from a high level they include:
Research & Discovery
- Identify existing market/experience gaps or missed potential through industry and competitor analysis
- Understand target demographics and their needs/goals
- Identify current customer pain points through user research
Define & Ideate
- Define needs/goals of users
- Define the problems being solved for, goals, strategy, success metrics etc. for the product/service
- Brainstorm as many ideas and potential solutions as possible that attempt to solve the problem(s) being designed for
- Innovative and wild ideas encouraged in this initial phase
Prototype & Validation
- Sift through all the early options/ideas and establish the options that have the most merit
- Build mockups/prototypes of these potential solutions and gather feedback on the proposed idea using questionnaires or surveys, focus groups, user testing sessions, A/B testing, analytics, etc.
- Iterate and continue testing to ensure that users and their needs continue to be met
Build, Test, Launch
– After ideas gain validation through testing, feedback, and approval from any stakeholders, it’s time to develop the solution as a product that customers can use
– Once the product has been developed, it needs to be tested to ensure that it works properly and that the experience will lead to the intended positive outcomes. This typically is done through internal QA but can also come in the form of private early access, alpha, and beta release strategies which help businesses gather important user feedback early in a product’s lifecycle
Iterate
Product design is cyclical in nature. Digital products are never done. There is almost always room for improvement within digital experiences and interfaces. Even if you think you have the perfect product, you’ll want to add new features to keep customers engaged and satisfied. Perhaps customers end up using your products in new or unintended/unforeseen ways, and your product needs to adapt to provide the experience your users want. Once a product is shipped, and in users’ hands, the design process restarts with the Research & Discovery phase to continuously improve and scale the product.
Thoughtful Design With the User in Mind
Service delivery and implementation are also highly important factors because they directly relate to how the product performs. If delivery systems are slow or fail, or code is full of bugs and prone to performance issues, these things create a negative customer perception of that product and company. “I consider the term ‘product design’ to be all-encompassing of both the back-end and front-end portions of digital products,” continues Sanders. “Support also plays a significant factor in the decisions product designers make. Product designers aim to create intuitive and elegant experiences. In other words, to design products that have as little impact as possible on incoming support channels.” Producing enablement material such as documentation and user guides can improve product interaction to some degree. However, a customer will inevitably call in for support at some point. As a result, they too play an integral role in informing how products are designed since support teams are one of the first touchpoints for customers to provide feedback.
What’s on the Horizon for Product Design?
Developing advancements in enterprise communications present some exciting possibilities for UCaaS product design. There is rapid integration of virtual and augmented reality that will reimagine how products are designed and the overall digital experience. While these are relatively new technology applications in this space, product designers will need to start considering use cases for their organisations. Likewise, voice command and conversational UI patterns are currently more embedded in our daily lives with Siri, Alexa, and voice-controlled appliances. It will be interesting to see the impact on UCaaS products and the cross-over these will have on business communications.
