Great products are in a committed relationship with their users
Unusual product insights from the world of dating?
Long lasting relationships are like long lasting products. First their is attraction, then making a good first impression, making the first intimate moment magical, taking responsibility for your mistakes, making a long term contractual agreement, and continuing to demonstrate how much you care through gifts and gratitude.
Recently, I watched a talk that derived product insights from marriage research. At first glance this seems a weird. My first thought was, are products really like relationships? come on. But if you stop to think about it... the pinnacle of product development it is building products that users love. Products that understand you and know the right things to say in the right moments, products that align with your values, and products that are your partner in all the important goals that you have in your life. If you replace partner with product in the previous sentences, the similarities between a long term intimate relationship and a long term product become eerily similar.
Dating, or attracting the right new users.
Attraction
Attraction is all about first impressions. What is the immediate emotional response upon a user first encountering your product? Visual design, the product equivalent of physical beauty might seem like it is most important in this first stage. I would argue that life context is more important, in other words, you have to know what the user is looking for. You have to know their situational context. Only then can we know how to tweak the details of our surface level visual appeal.
Situational context is about knowing who, when and what about our users. Specifically, the who question is important because it tells us a bit about how knowledgable they may be about us and what we offer. When is important because it tells us all about the constraints and motivations around our interactions. What is important because it helps us identify where users want to go, what they want to achieve or get done as a result of using our product in a specific moment, and over longer periods of time.
Once we understand the context, first impressions become a lot more clear. First impressions are about the emotions that you bring up upon first glance, first interaction and first failure to meet an expectation.
Practical product moments as a first impression.
Upon first Glance
Landing Pages
First Emails
Addressing common questions
Reduce anxiety of a new thing
Paint a picture of how life will be with this new thing in your life
Express empathy and clarity about the struggles that the user faces
Upon first interaction
Sign up / Onboarding
Identify and execute on the Magic moment
First use and first experiments
Make it easy and simple to take action
Upon first failure or under expectation
Play the long game
Transparency
Over correct
Take responsibility
The start of the committed relationship
The entanglement
Lots of people get attraction but many fewer get to the point of a committed relationship. Most product people think of the magic moment as the point in which a users heart has been won over. This is, in fact, incorrect. Loyalty in the game of product love is hard to find. This point in the journey goes far beyond a magic moment. This point in our journey should be called entanglement , an implicit or explicit proposition for a user to integrate your product into other important and or utilitarian parts of their life.
Where are the points of entanglement?
Integrations
Become a key part of they systems of solutions that a user needs to attain a certain goal
Other relevant relationships
Become a intermediary to other relevant and important relationships
The moat of marriage
Marriage in the product life cycle is all about the functional and emotional system that your product lives in. The word system here is important, because system implies more than one, it implies the interaction of components to create an outcome. This means that your product must evolve, it has to serve new struggles, it has to deliver new solutions. To me, this contractual and emotional lock in is sort of like a moat. You know your users so well and are committed to them, no other person or product should be able to penetrate that bond.
Or can they?
I am not married, but similar to products, relationships have to be maintained. Thus, it is not so surprising that they atrophy. If I look around at most married couples and most established products, they, frankly, look like they are no longer trying to attract and impress each other (or their users).
Gifts and gratitude are the way to long term product sustainability and maintaining the initial attraction that started the user product love story. Specifically, gifts are about surprising the user in all kinds of ways, showing them that you still care. This can be by delivering new features or understanding and alleviating new pain points as their life and the world evolve. Gratitude is the other antidote to atrophy, showing your users how thankful you are for their business and their use. Counterintuitively, one of the best forms of gratitude is simply listening to and valuing the opinion of others. In the context of product it means asking for, listening to and sincerely seeking to improve upon the things your users are telling you need to be fixed.