Jon Kolko

"A new way to create-and then disrupt Industry disruption is no longer isolated to a unique product or service. Today's consumer needs engagement in order to be swayed to interact, connect, and buy your next offering. Achieve this and you'll achieve success. Sharp and refreshing, design insider and expert Jon Kolko offers a new view and usable process for conceiving and building powerful, emotionally resonant new products in this new book. In Well-Designed, Kolko-VP at MyEdu and Founder and Director of the Austin Center for Design--shows how deep, meaningful engagement happens when products and services are delivered in an authentic way, when consumers see them less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends. The key is empathy-driven design thinking, using a process of storytelling and iteration, with results that provoke emotion, change behavior, and create deep engagement. Kolko, who has been engaged in this process of design for more than 15 years, now shares a concrete set of steps for identifying lucrative opportunities, designing for innovation, and producing products that have deep, meaningful emotional engagement. By following this process, readers will learn how to raise the role of design to a strategic competency"--

How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

Well-designed

PG Gonni

Companies exist on a spectrum… You need to come to terms with the type of organization you want to be, and one isn't better than the other. But the people need to be onboard with the kind of company you are, because otherwise you are swimming upstream.

It’s not about making your idea happen. It's about helping the best idea happen.

Before you begin development efforts, help your engineering team understand what determines the success of a given effort. What behavior will you track? How will you track that behavior? And what goals do you have for that metric to indicate if it's working as desired?

You can short-circuit endless debates over features, functions, and design details by making things. The thing can be a diagram, a sketch, or a high-level fidelity design artifact. When you make a thing, an idea becomes real.

Why code that doesn't function properly should be fixed is obvious. It's not always evident why poorly aligned images are worth fixing, particularly with limited development resources. You need to explain how consistency, visual acuity, and polish have an impact on trust, and how trust is critical to the product's success.

A single number to represent a read of how the community is doing

Joe takes the average of this number across all users, adjusted for how long the user has been a member of the site, and tracks it in aggregate. He then has a single figure indicating the global wellness of his community of users. If the product is helping people feel more in control of their bodies, that number should go up over time.

Don’t love the idea you have to stay up late at night to get to good solutions, but generally love the point of simple solutions existing at either end of the mountain of complexity.

They aren't bringing me simple solutions that are on the early side of complexity; they bring me simple solutions that are the results of late nights of analysis.

Good product managers are not overly dramatic about their successes or failures. They say, "OK, we did that, it worked, it didn't work." There's a fine line of acknowledging that things didn't work and not dwelling on and defending the choices you made, so you don't look as bad as you really look. Just accept it and move on.

That's what good product managers do. They find opportunities and marshal the resources necessary to make them successful.

Try the A-B-C-Q approach to variation. This is the idea of creating several expected variants, changing minor details (A leads to B, B leads to C), and then creating a wild or surprising jump (Q).

Don't worry about being exciting. Instead, ask a lot of questions. Be interested, not interesting.

You need to give people discrete options, instead of infinite options. Restraint is important as a product manager.

Ponder the calendar idea, the group idea, the magazines, and the devices, and think about why these are so effective in the analogous situation. Then steal the ideas liberally and repurpose them in the new context… analogy is at the core of all human thinking and is the connective tissue that helps us make sense of the world around us.

As a designer, I ask myself: “What features can I take away and still achieve my goal? What is the minimal amount of animation or movement that can expose a personality in my product? How can I make my product distinct using only a minimal number of aesthetic elements?"

I remember a story about how successful products come from everyone on the team knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it. You could ask a random engineer how the feature fits into the larger story.

 That's part of why I've retreated to this idea of trying to understand traits rather than functions, because the structure of these organizations doesn't look the same at all.

The more things you have experienced, the broader your palette of extra knowledge, the more you can build upon and refine interpretations in order to arrive at unique and useful insights. 

Each statement is presented as a fact, but each is actually an inference. Each statement may be factually wrong, so using insights will introduce risk into your process, but this risk has its reward. Insights are the source of innovation: insights are gold.

Some [products] get big as people store more data in them; this is called progressive commitment. You put more data in the system and you become more and more committed to the system over time. It gets harder and harder to leave that service. Evernote or Dropbox are great examples.

An exercise to identify weaknesses in GTM strategy. Imagining a competitor to whom you lose miserably

You can get ahead, however, by presuming that a competitor will introduce a new product into the market. In this scenario, imagine that your product loses miserably to that new product.

Some diagrams are presentation artifacts, used to rationalize your ideas to other people. Think of these, instead, as working artifacts. The purpose in creating them is to help you consider and establish strategy. Counterintuitively, once the artifacts have been made, they lose their value because they've already accomplished their goal: of informing your broad trajectory.

“Anything that will be a billion dollar industry in 10 years is already 10 years old. If you study history, almost no one invented anything."

Thank goodness we left behind the notion that in the world of technology, you're supposed to do stuff in a scalable way. We tried that, in the early days, and failed miserably. Scaling is the wrong approach when looking for product-market fit. You have no scale to solve for when you are starting something. So why optimize for that?

The best way to learn about product development, to learn the difference between design and product management, is to start something and do everything yourself. You'll intimately understand the tensions between the creative side and the 'ship it side. At some point, you have to converge, stop ideating, and get to the point where you can produce it, ship it, code it, and

ebrar

ürün tasarımı süreci en basit şekilde anlatılmış, yolun başında olmama rağmen benim için bile aşırı ufuk açıcı değildi. yine de başlangıç için güzel bir kitap. en çok beğendiğim yönü ise çeşitli product manager ve designerlarla kısa röportajların olmasıydı. böylece farklı ürünlerin gelişme süreçlerini ve neden kullanıcılara hitap ettiklerini daha iyi anlamış oldum.

Great read, and super inspiring for any designer or product manager. Although some of the examples and concepts feel somewhat dated almost 10 years later, the process and mental framework described are just as valid today as when the book was written.

Dharmesh Mehta

There is so much around us - gadgets, softwares, appliances, architecture. What makes us, the users, connect with some products and not others. How does Apple manage time and again to woo people? How did Nest manage to earn a $3.2 billion Google acquisition? The emotional connection. They know how to address the needs and the feelings of people. They know how to design products with empathy.

This isn't simply a sit-back and read book. It's a playbook. Jon walks you through a well-crafted process to create something with emotional appeal. He also takes a fictitious example of LiveWell and includes an interview with successful people of the game. A jargon-free, quick-paced, designed-for-all bundle of awesomeness.

Ron Bronson

Thought it was extremely readable and way more of a page turner for a book like this. The interviews with startup types to me didn't really do much. But the process stuff and how he goes through it is what makes this worth the price.

From Design Thinking to Design Doing Innovators today are told to run loose and think lean in order to fail fast and succeed sooner. But in a world obsessed with the new, where cool added features often trump actual customer needs, it’s the consumer who suffers. In our quest to be more agile, we end up creating products that underwhelm. So how does a company like Nest, creator of the mundane thermostat, earn accolades like “beautiful” and “revolutionary” and a $3.2 billion Google buyout? What did Nest do differently to create a household product that people speak of with love? Nest, and companies like it, understand that emotional connection is critical to product development. And they use a clear, repeatable design process that focuses squarely on consumer engagement rather than piling on features for features’ sake. In this refreshingly jargon-free and practical book, product design expert Jon Kolko maps out this process, demonstrating how it will help you and your team conceive and build successful, emotionally resonant products again and again. The key, says Kolko, is empathy. You need to deeply understand customer needs and feelings, and this understanding must be reflected in the product. In successive chapters of the book, we see how leading companies use a design process of storytelling and iteration that evokes positive emotions, changes behavior, and creates deep engagement. Here are the four key steps: 1. Determine a product-market fit by seeking signals from communities of users. 2. Identify behavioral insights by conducting ethnographic research. 3. Sketch a product strategy by synthesizing complex research data into simple insights. 4. Polish the product details using visual representations to simplify complex ideas. Kolko walks the reader through each step, sharing eye-opening insights from his fifteen-year career in product design along the way. Whether you’re a designer, a product developer, or a marketer thinking about your company’s next offering, this book will forever change the way you think about—and create—successful products.

Well-Designed

Ellen Chisa

This book is the closest I've come to one that summarizes the process I've used to build things - and one of the better books on the role of the PM discipline (especially through interviews).

My only major concern is the lack of diversity featured in the book - just one interviewee talking about Kathy Sierra, and a brief snippet from a designer at Frog. 

I think getting a bit further away from the typical "product" people would have added nuance and depth to the concepts.

Well-designed How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

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