Aspirational Product Design Intro
I had no idea that strolling past a small booth in the Javits Convention Center in NYC would provide me with one of the most gratifying moments in my career.
I paused at a booth to watch a 2D engineering drawing animate between 2D and 3D views in a new way that made such drawings clearer than they had ever been before. And done in an engagingly visual way.
The person working the booth approached me and said, “That’s an eDrawing”. Unprompted by me, he proceeded to tell me how he received an eDrawing for the first time from a peer who wanted to discuss the design. But he was so enthralled by the animated drawing, that he only wanted to know what this drawing technology was, and how could he create these drawings himself. Now he sends eDrawings to everyone that he needs to communicate designs to.
I listened very attentively while he told me the story. But what I did not share with him was that in an amazing coincidence, I had invented the concepts and product he was showing me. And that I led the very talented team that built and launched the eDrawings product. I kept this to myself because I wanted to hear how he truly felt about the product and his experience.
Needless to say, I was on cloud 9 after he finished sharing his story. Not only because he loved the product, but more amazingly, his experience and the actions he took to share the product, was the exact scenario I had designed for. All I could think to myself as I walked away was, “I can’t believe it, it worked, it actually worked!!”
eDrawings became the number one source of leads for SolidWorks for well over a decade, and became one of the company’s most prominent product brands.
So what contributed to the success of this product? Well part of it was an epiphany I had while doing my customer research. After a number of interviews, I realized that we needed to solve the problems that users had very strong feelings about. Not the problems that most users had. It was truly about quality over quantity when it came to user pain points and the opportunities they provided. In this case, the pain point (frustration) was centered on the difficulty of communicating engineering designs with people in other companies. Solving this was THE priority for the solution we were to create. By doing this, users instantly and effortlessly found the resulting product, eDrawings, the one they loved to use and share with others.
There were also strategies that we kept in mind while we designed the product and the user experience (UX). These included:
Providing something that felt familiar and comfortable
Having a surprising “wow factor”
The product had to be obvious and effortless to use!
Viral Adoption
It had to make the eDrawings sender look “cool” to the recipient
It had to be obvious and effortless to the recipient on how to adopt the product
These turned out to be very successful strategy choices for this product. Over the subsequent years, I have refined my approach to leveraging these strategies and others. What it has evolved to is an emphasis on truly understanding what is most important to customers, and then doing the heavy-lifting of connecting our product value-add to their priorities, in a way that is obvious and easy to extract value from. This is what I now call Aspirational Product Design.
The blog posts that follow will be a distillation of these strategies and approaches. I really hope that you all find this useful.