Don’t forget to test your product design. You won’t believe how often the UX and UI of a burgeoning product are untested and pushed to the masses. For example, when Comixology merged with Amazon, the online retail giant scrapped a good portion of the digital comic book reader’s original design. In its place was a space, a barely usable interface that sent the user base into a tizzy and put a lot of people off digital comics (myself included). I can only imagine the turmoil behind the scenes that lead to that V1 design going out. I know for certain that the app did not go through enough, or any resting for that matter.
The remedy: Test Product Designs
When you are developing a product, regardless of how confident you are in the design or how irrelevant you may think testing is (I have had that said me to by stakeholders before), take the time to invest in the product’s longevity. It could be as simple as asking folks in your company who aren’t working on the design to take a look and give them a few scenarios to answer. How would you do X on this page? If you click Button Y, what do you expect to happen? What would you press on Screen A to get to Screen B? Now you have free data! Imagine what you could do with a budget, a panel of users, and a day? Your product can only benefit.
Find gaps in the design. Understand the target audience patterns. See what works and capitalize on your good thinking. If your product design completely fails, at least you know and can fix the problem without a million users clicking the “Support” option in your footer.
Data is King, Queen, Prince, and Ace. So test your product design now. Only good can come from it.