Aspirational Product Design
Whether you are an entrepreneur, product manager, engineer, designer or executive; you want your customers and users to love the products you build for them. It’s important to the business and it makes your work more gratifying.
If a product addresses all of a user’s functional needs, will this be a product that they love, enthusiastically tell others about, and want to use all the time? Or is it more likely that they will just like the product? Now this is not a bad thing, but it’s not compelling either.
I am going to argue that we must go beyond a functionally effective product, which should be seen as table-stakes. Instead, if every time I use a product, it makes me feel like the person I aspire to be. The person I want others to see me as… I’m going to love using the product, and will want to use it all the time.
Facebook is an example. Its original purpose was to better connect like minded people within communities (i.e. college campuses). But I don’t think that capability is what made Facebook compelling in its early days. I feel what really made Facebook successful was its unstated value of allowing people to quantify their popularity. “Look, I have 500 close friends” 🙄.
Adjectives like “popular” are what I refer to as someone’s desired self image (which I will be using this interchangeably with “aspirations”). How do they want to be seen by the people who matter to them… their boss, peers, direct reports, friends, loved ones, etc.? Who do they aspire to be? And different customer segments prioritize different adjectives. Does a particular segment want to be seen as beautiful, smart, influential, reliable, competent, powerful, etc.? What are your target customer’s top 3 to 5 aspirations?
Identifying your target segment’s desired self image is an important step in this approach I call Aspirational Product Design (APD).
Once we settle on what their most important aspirations are, we can compliment traditional functional requirements with these aspirational ones. This combination of functional and aspirational requirements will inform the user experience (UX) we ultimately provide. Our goal is to create an effective product which also provides an experience that helps the user achieve their desired self image. Early Facebook users felt and grew their popularity every time they used it.
This approach of taking emotions and aspirations into account is not limited to consumer products. Professionals that use technical and industrial tools are people too. They also have aspirations and want to project certain things about themselves to the people around them. If they have two products to choose between, both functionally equivalent, they are going to choose the product that makes them feel like the person they aspire to be.
As an example, a project manager wants to be seen as “competent”, a person who always delivers and nothing ever falls through the cracks. To help them achieve this, maybe we highlight things that threaten the schedule in their dashboard, or maybe always highlighted somewhere in a persistent part of the UI. We can even accompany the issue with insights on why it is a problem, and possible ways to address. By providing users with this obvious, relevant and timely information, we equip them to be proactive in maintaining the schedule. This person would feel and be seen by others as being very “competent”.
Without APD, this functionality could still end up in the product, but may end up in a less prominent place. And therefore diminish the chances of providing users with these very gratifying moments.
Think of APD as a compliment to your current product design, build and launch process. The emphasis being on the earlier stages of the process. It is an aspirational lens that adds more color and depth to your understanding of your customers. And then you can leverage this understanding to craft a product that customers will effortlessly appreciate and love.
This is also helpful in achieving team alignment. Not only do these aspirations inform the product priorities and design, but Marketing and Sales can also use to create messaging that you already know will be compelling to the customer. Messaging that will be consistent with the product you have provided.
The first step is to have conversations with customers. Conversations where you encourage and allow them to share what is most important to them. My next blog post will be on customer interviews, and will include prompts you can use to uncover their most important aspirations.
