How to grasp the timing of adding to product design

"Guide" If you are a designer, then part of the job is to identify when to add to the product, and in addition to a new feature should ask it in the overall direction of the product to play what role, and then make a decision. Designers want to design from the whole, not from the local.

And as Jack Dorsey says, a good product is to go to the interfere, build the impossible. However, a good design is not equal to a good UI, because it should also be designed to improve efficiency, that is, to design a better, simpler experience that can help users do what they want to do faster.

Generally speaking, when the first version of a product, the second edition is gradually recognized by the user, wait until the user base began to expand, many companies will choose to take their products step after step of the complication. But the cost of adding too much may sacrifice part of the user experience. recently, Etsy's chief designer, Cap Watkins, svbtle his views on the issue:

When your product is still the original version, most of the functions are to achieve the core functions of the service. New modules, pages, columns, stacks, form fields are used to highlight and support the core features of the product. And at this stage, all of the considerations in the internal function do this. Your product is responding well.

Then you start trying to do some "icing on the cake" and perfect work. As you've done before, you start creating new pages, columns, stacks, and form fields for new features. The first few months of product design experience and the process of building a product tell you that the current version is the best and easiest way to solve the problem. So you start writing crazy code, and it turns out that the user did use your new features, and that's great.

The problem is that after the first two experiences, you start the third, fourth, and fifth attempts ...

A year later, your navigation bar is already as long as your arm. Each page has its corresponding function, and there are multiple layers on a single page. In other words, your product starts to lose focus and weight and become cluttered.

As a designer, part of the job is to identify when to add a product, and before adding a feature, ask what role it plays in the general direction of the product before making a decision. Make the design from the whole, not the local.

The user's attention is limited. Each time the product is additive, the new function is bound to compete with other existing functions, and the result is to dilute the usage frequency and attention of other functions. Also, each additional form field, the product's overall "noise" will increase, and sometimes add a bit of noise is right, but most of the time we should make a trade-off, that is, to replace a function should be corresponding to reduce a function. Then there is the need to learn to say no to the new function. Do not blindly add to the product, but based on the product's intuition, experience, empathy, to design more valuable products, only so that your product design is valuable and meaningful.