Product critique
I read this wonderful article — How to do a product critique. by Julie Zhuo who remains an inspiration for designers at all stages.
In her article, she explains how a product critique could work. Breaking it down into before, first time usage, and weeks after. Each of the stage helping build some kind of connection with the application or the product and learning about different things.
I liked the aspect of being able to distill these things as an interview question. I pondered about how this method could be used in different scenarios in a designers day in life.
Could we improve our product intuition?
In other words we look at Doors, at switches, at Instagram, at ERP applications, at browsers, do we end up developing a larger sense of what a product does, and how it does it in a practitioners view point.
From how Julie mentions about the experience from a stage point (before, first time usage, and weeks after) of view and then layering it with questions about each of the stage.
Maybe Peter Morville Honey comb is a great place to layer this — Usable, findable, accessible, credible, valuable, useful. Have questions that connect with each one of these.
Improve our ability to compare?
A warm hello to the ability to compare, connect with the products and spot how things could be better. We could start with generic products that we know of — How does Snapchat compare with Instagram, or how does chrome compare with Safari.
Starting with generic leading onto products that we design, we could potentially learn to compare better. What audience is Snapchat vs. that of Instagram, similarly the Software product we are designing for, Is it for Mid-market, or for small businesses.
The D2C experience compared with amazon’s, flipkarts, and other offerings in the ecommerce space.
Could we look at what we or our teams design and quickly critique?
With an improved product intuition, and ability to compare we could apply our improved product sense to our own designs or to our peers designs. We could kind of build a framework and ask the same questions for the work completed.
Interface critique method
Here’s my little contribution, I would like to extend Julie Zhou’s method with a Interface critique method, four questions i have often asked my own designs, and the designs i critique. These are closely tied to affordance of an interface.
Where am I, Why Am I here, What can I do, and how can i do it
This is like a cognitive walkthrough, Put yourself in the shoes of the user and look at the interface, can you without the product knowledge evidently answer these four questions. Yes without the baggage of technical and interface flow knowledge.
Where am I!
Can the interface through visual hierarchy, through breadcrumbs, through labels, and other aspect communicate where I am?
Most interfaces do this poorly, trust me. A lot of drop-offs happen when users are too deep into an interface and cannot understand where they are.
Why am I here?
What’s the purpose of being on the screen. What tasks can i complete here, how those tasks help me in achieving my goals.
This would be incomplete without good labels, good titles, great UX copy.
What i can do here?
Can I checkout, can I logout, what can i do over here helps the basic answer. If a user cannot figure it out without a lot of attention or cognitive load, it is likely we are going to have a difficult to use interface.
How can i do it?
This is strictly affordance, can I sort, can I submit, can I delete, are all these methods open and clear.
Closing it up!
Like i mentioned i have borrowed from Cognitive walkthroughs, which is a age old method.
I personally would use the two methods if in an interview i was asked to critique a product. I would use the methods together, if i was to onboard onto a new product i have been asked to design.
Thanks for reading so far. Let me know if you have any comments, let me know how i can improve this article better.
