What makes a product design excellent?
There are so many opinions about this. Some people may agree or disagree with several opinions out there. According to my experience working as a product designer, I have gotten to know several things and signs to look at to judge whether a product is an excellent design or not. So here is my opinion on what are the signs of a product has an excellent design or not.
What is excellent design?
Excellent design is when a product not only covers the basic qualities but goes beyond. Designers and companies that make the excellent design are commonly sought after in the industry because they took the extra effort, time, and care in making sure they fulfill their own standard which is above the average. Products that have excellent design don't have only a pleasant interface and good experience, they have both pristine interface and brilliant experience.
Why do we need to know whether or not a product has an excellent design?
You don't need to know, but it's very good to know.
Knowing what makes a design excellent gets you one (or many) step(s) ahead of your competitor. Because almost anyone can make an acceptable design but only a few can make an excellent design.
So, come, my friend, let's take a look at the signs that your product has an excellent design!
The more signs you spotted in your product, the higher chance it has excellent design.
Sign 1: Words/Copy Are Greatly Written
Look at the copy they use in the product interface. Is the language consistent throughout? Is the copy always written in the shortest way but still very clear? Is the copy specific enough instead of using one generic sentence that left you (user) sometimes unsure what to do? Is the copy aligning with the brand's tone and voice?
When building a product, it is easy to type the words that are clear. But to type words that are not only clear, but also easy to read, aligning with the brand's tone, consistent, and specific takes time and extra effort. So if you have seen a product that has a consistent tone, is specific, clear as well as easy to be read, then there is a high chance this product has excellent design!
Sign 2: Overlooked Pages Are In Great Design
Try to use the product and fully explore it. Go to the places where most people don't go. For example, their Settings page or go deep inside subpages. Most people will focus on designing an amazing interface in the most commonly visited pages such as the homepage. But you can say a product has excellent design when they also take care of the pages that most people don't think of going to. It also takes extra time and effort to polish those pages. Many companies or designers don't think of those pages and sometimes even if they do, they decided it is not worth the time because it doesn't directly add revenue. While they may be right that those pages are so insignificant they don't really add revenue, leaving out those pages doesn't make their product have an excellent design.
Sign 3: They Still Appreciate You Even For 'Leaving' Them
Oftentimes, I see companies don't have a nice page dedicated for their customers to leave them. Some scenarios are such as when the potential customer wanted to unsubscribe from their email newsletter (provided they have their own custom page for unsubscribing), their page looks terrible with a very bad user experience. It also happens in other subscription-based companies. If the page you go to stop your subscription looks terrible, doesn't work, or has extreme difficulty in accomplishing what it intended to do, then you know what that means! 😉
I find it terrible how some companies 'sweet-talk' their way to make you purchase their product/services with amazing interface and experience but when you decided to stop your purchase, they treat you so mean with their bad interface and experience in their unsubscribing/cancel purchase page. I understand that they don't want to polish these pages because these pages make them lose money. But I think if they would give extra care and love to users that wanted to stop their purchase, they would get a pretty good chance of returning customers or even good reviews.
Think of it this way, if the salesperson is super nice to you and when you decided to return your item and then they became extremely mean to you, would you repurchase? You'd even probably tell about this bad experience to your friends or family. This means, by not taking extra care to polish unsubscribe/stop purchase design, you are at higher risk of losing more money.
Sign 4: They Save You Even More Time And Effort To Accomplish An Already Simple Tasks
It is common for companies or designers to make their users click a button for something that is so simple. After all, clicking a button is also easy, right?
But products with excellent design think far more than just "this is already an easy way". The team behind it work hard to think "How can this process be even easier and simpler for the users?". So they would figure out a way until it is no longer possible to make the process any simpler/easier and the development team worked extra hard to ensure that users get only the simplest way to accomplish the task.
For example, it is common for us designers to press Command+S or Ctrl+S or click File>Save to save our artwork in Photoshop. But in Figma, they autosave your work so you don't have to press anything anymore. The result? No more forgetting to save your artwork.
Sign 5: They Are Inclusive
A design can be called excellent when they are inclusive. That means inclusive of people of color, countries, cultural background, and even their conditions. To design something that works for people with no mental/physical disabilities and target a certain group of people is fulfilling just the basic. But to design something that works for almost all people with whatever their conditions, race, country, and cultural background is what makes a product excellent.
If you can use products even with your disabilities, that means the company/designers are thinking about you and designed something that you won't be left out of. It is also great for people of color or some people that are not commonly represented in the media are represented/catered for in that product. This shows how much they care for everyone and they don't want anyone to feel left out or don't belong.
Although at the moment this is a sign of excellent design, I can see this will be the basic requirement of an acceptable product design in the near future.
Sign 6: Edge Cases Are Taken Care
It's easy to say "People would rarely do this, let's just not think about the design for this case". While it is an understandable way to think because there can be limited time and energy, this is still not excellent. An excellent design will go beyond and find out how to handle edge cases that even nobody would think of. They would give extra effort to make sure that there is almost no chance their users will find out a glitch in their product.
Sign 7: They Are Transparent
No, I am not talking about transparent glass UI (although that's cool too!). In this context, a product has excellent design when they don't just use the users' data but also let users know what they are doing with their data, what they collect, and possibly how they collected the data. And this information should be easily accessible and not hidden. It should also ask its users for permission to access their data and track them if there is any.
An excellent product design should respect its users. By being transparent to them, they are being respectful of users, their data, and their life.
Now that you have known the signs of an excellent product design, how many products are there that have all the signs?
On a side note, it's definitely not a must to create an excellent design.
With just an acceptable design, the product might work just fine. Excellent product design shows that there is an opportunity to grow even further and to make sure you are ahead. It is also understandable to create a product that has an acceptable design because of many reasons, one being the monetary reason.
Like what other people say, "Done is better.", oftentimes making an acceptable product is better than aiming to make an excellent product if it means you can get the product out and test it fast. Don't worry, the opportunity to be excellent is always present.
Now go ahead and keep on creating!
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