User Experience’s Sacred Seven
Not so recently, before moving to London, I read a book called Product Management’s Sacred Seven to soothe the terrified, soon-to-be Product Manager in me, which my then interviewer and later boss hailed as the ‘North Star’ of where we were trying to be.
Lots of helpful pointers in the book for those interested, especially Product, Marketing or CX (Customer Experience) folks looking to brush up on some of their conceptual knowledge.
Disclaimer: I read the book after my interview (hadn’t heard of it before), though there are some great tips in there to crack a PM interview too.
The section I’d like to talk about here is good User Experience (UX) – which includes a good-looking User Interface (UI) – because we have a lot to thank some thoughtful designers for. Just ask 80% of the children who no longer needed sedation when the frightening hospital CT scan machines were reimagined as pirate ships.
Good UX is pacifying. According to the book, to elevate customer and product experiences, it should also be one or more of the following:
1. Discoverable – The features should be easy to find and use (unlike Norman doors that tell you to push when you are supposed to pull or vice-versa), like how in UI design, you have prominent, well-labelled, red delete buttons (to signal danger) or greyed out ‘next’ and ‘submit’ buttons when you leave some fields incomplete.
2. Responsive – You learn whether your action worked through multi-sensory feedback – haptic (that gives a slight vibration when something happens along with a visual notification), touch or sound-based – like the tearing sound of a tape dispenser, breadcrumbs or progress bars, vibrating phones, or bumps on F and J keys to indicate if your hands are in the right place without having to look down.
3. Forgiving – To err is human, to forgive divine. Be like Google Maps – you haven’t taken a wrong turn, you’ve simply re-routed. You can make mistakes less dangerous, less likely or reversible, like auto-correcting typos, making irreversible actions more difficult (coders must type ‘delete’ for confirmation in GitHub), or recalling sent emails on Outlook. You should also explain why something went wrong in the first place and how it can be fixed.
4. Intuitive – UX should fit our mental models to make navigation easier. Windows 8 failed when it removed the Start button and had to reintroduce it in later versions. YouTube lets users gently transition to redesigns, keeping core functionalities like top search bars and subscribe buttons intact. Conflicting mental models can even be life-threatening, as seen in Tesla’s self-driving cars with a hybrid rider-driver model that keeps confused drivers switching between relaxed and alert modes.
Mental models also influence UI metaphors, from file icons to trash cans, and the tactile gestures of swiping, dragging or zooming in and out. This ties into skeuomorphism, where new designs are built on old ones for familiarity, such as motor cars having ‘horsepower’ from earlier horse-drawn carriages and digital cameras imitating shutter clicks. Though Apple moved to flat designs in the 2010s, skeuomorphism cycles persist in cars, watches, and even crypto, which mimics the stock market to build trust.
5. Usable – We get stressed and overwhelmed with too many choices, leading to analysis paralysis and choice paradox. So, it’s better to go by Hick’s Law – keep it simple, stupid. Another great thing well-designed products do is shift the burden from users to developers (like auto-populating fields in emails). They account for cultural diversity, such as Western audiences leaning towards laptop-first designs and Eastern audiences towards mobile-first, since many experienced digital technologies on their mobiles first and continue to use all-in-one apps like WeChat.
‘Zooming in’ on tablet-first designs.
6. Honest – No one likes sneaky patterns by companies to make an extra buck, such as hidden fees or difficult-to-get-out-of subscription services. Instead, creating win-win experiences like the IKEA store can make both users and bottom lines happy. Glossier lets micro-influencers feature on social media by clicking good pictures of themselves wearing Glossier products, earning the brand free WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing and a collection of rich, shareable content.
7. Accessible – Last but not least, great UX is accessible to all, including the 16% of the world with disabilities. Ergonomic peelers in the kitchen were built for people with arthritis, but everyone loved it. Microsoft’s inclusive design of using captions where first languages were different helped everyone, not just people who were deaf or hard of hearing.
When building an app, try blurring the visuals or using your non-dominant hand to see how someone with a vision impairment or motor disability might experience your product. You can also add voice inputs or reduce the number of taps required.
May constraints fuel your creativity and each of these functionalities test and improve your product design.
