Finest-5 Product reads #35

Fitts Law in product, DocuSign and 1 billion signatures, etc.

Hey,

So, we all know, product management and decision making go hand in hand. If you can make excellent decisions, you are a great product manager. However, it’s not that simple. A lot of complexity and always a crunch of time. Help yourself though frameworks, read part 1 and part 2 of decision making by marc.

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Fitts’s Law and Its Applications in UX

The movement time to a target depends on the size of the target and the distance to the target.

Key Takeaways:

• Not only does a text label reduce icon ambiguity, but it also improves movement time to that target

• In real-world interface design, we do not have infinite targets. Screen edges are a replacement for easy reach, as long as the interaction is mouse-driven. E.g. start in windows.

• If you know that a set of controls will be clicked in a certain order, place them close to each other to minimise the distance between them and optimise overall task time

  

From Funnels to Flywheels

Traditional sales organisations used the concept of a sales “funnel”. Today, thinking is in favour of building flywheels — business models in which every element reinforces every other.

Key Takeaways:

• The sale isn’t even the end of the process — it’s somewhere in the middle (particularly true with subscription and software-as-a-service models)

• Modern digital organisations create business models that are flywheels, in which additional force on any part of the model creates multiplicative effects throughout the business.

• Amazon: Low prices and a large selection of products drew in customers just as the company’s focus on creating great customer experiences kept them coming back, increasing traffic.

Write better docs with a product thinking mindset

Product Thinking is about understanding motivations, conceiving solutions, simulating their effects, and picking a path based on the effects you want to create.

Key Takeaways:

• Despite caring deeply about helping users, still it’s easy to fall into a “just get it done” mindset or project thinking

• Create cues in your writing process: get access to people with essential information, write learning outcomes for your documentation, consider the content design of your documentation, and test everything about your proposed changes!

• With a deep understanding of the why and why now behind product development decisions, you can structure and write your content in a way that accommodates customer goals alongside these product limitations

One billion signatures

DocuSign, the e-Signature service, holds many impressive statistics—including their headline numbers: 100 million customers, 1 billion users, spread across 180 different countries.

Key Takeaways:

• If you already have an Airbnb account, you’ll be prompted to log in instead of creating a new one. There’s a security trade-off that may not be obvious.

• DocuSign avoided the temptation to simply make the desktop experience responsive for smaller devices—which is extremely common

• New users sign up to a trial of DocuSign thinking it’s free. By staying silent, and deferring all of that friction into a single moment, you’re almost guaranteeing a major point of frustration, or worse; a sense of deception.

What characteristics make a good metric

Metrics are so intimidating when picking up that we go with the most easy ones or most common one’s out there. But asking basic questions and picking a good metric is very important for product success.

Key Takeaways:

• You want to pick a metric that has a consistent interpretation as it increases or decreases. And this one is not always obvious without testing with hypothetical numbers.

• We pick a rate metric that allows you to compare over time (current versus prior) or with different groups (session type, device).

• You want the metric to be easy to measure (data collection) and easy to calculate

Product of the week: Daybridge

Make time for what matters

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