When someone standing next to you on the bus shows your app to her friends and explains how amazing it is, you know you have achieved something great. When you don't have to explain what you do, but just say the name of your product, well, that's a good sign, too.
In 2017, you have a better chance of building something extraordinary and helping millions of people than ever before in human history. You have all the tools. It’s out there. And it’s almost completely free.
But if it’s so easy, why don’t we have more Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks running around?
The answer is simple: most people do not really know how to design a product. I don’t mean drawing fancy buttons in Sketch or Photoshop. Designing a product is much more. Behind every success story in recent years, there was a product person, a designer, a manager, a CEO or someone who really knew how to put together something extraordinary.
Designing a product starts with understanding people, finding out what their pains and needs are, knowing them better than they know themselves. If you perceive their problems well enough, you have a chance to build something for them.
Building a digital product is not a list of design and programming tasks. It is the journey where you discover what hurts your audience, and experiment with different solutions until you find something they will love.
You can not do it sitting in front of a computer. You have to go out, meet with these people, talk to them, test your prototypes with them. And do it again and again. If you don’t give up too early, you will end up with a great product.
The World Wide Web amazed me in high school fifteen years ago. That was when I fell in love with digital products. I read Jakob Nielsen’s book about web design, and it was astounding. I never thought that one day I would publish my own book about digital products.
So today is a BIG day for me. I am publishing my first book, Product Design.
In the book, I go through the steps of the product design process. It starts with product discovery methods which will help you find your audience’s pains and needs. I explain the tricks most famous tech companies use, and I also show some examples and case studies from our work at UX studio.
The book will teach you how to find people’s pain points, build prototypes, and test them. There are nine different UX research methods explained, all with real-life examples. You can also learn how to do all these things in a corporate environment, and integrate product design into the agile software development process every company uses nowadays. I also collected some great UX workshop methods which will help you convince your team and stakeholders.
I’ve spent the last six months collecting all these case studies and methods. My goal was to write a comprehensive guide to designing digital products people will love. It took me more time than I had expected, but it’s finally here and I am very proud of it. It’s 199 pages filled with beautiful illustrations and real-life examples.
