I was excited to get Designing Products People Love from Scott Hurff after hearing about it on a podcast (sorry, I don’t remember which one). This book was an enjoyable and fast read. I found many really great take aways and learnings that I’d share, be sure to pick up a copy and read it yourself. There are many more great ideas than those I have included here. Let me know what you learned from this book.

In the second chapter “How to Create Products People Love”, Scott gives a simple tool to help us and our team to understand our customers better. He calls it the “Pain Matrix”. A simple 2x2 matrix that plots the frequency of pain versus the level (high vs low) of pain. Just like Boston Consulting Group’s famous Growth-Share Matrix, each quadrant has specific meanings which should help us prioritize what we should be exploring, designing, and building.

Product language is really important. It’s also an area where most product teams struggle. They often use internal terms to talk about the product versus the languages that their design targets use. I was happy to find a whole chapter “User Interfaces Begin with Words” that addresses the importance of the words we use in our products. If products teams bought this book and read only this chapter and took the recommendations to heart, customers would be so much happier using our products.

Then there is “The Mechanics of Interface Design” chapter. This. Just buy it. There are some really important points from prototype fidelity to application of Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” to product design to Hurff’s “The UI Stack”. The UI stack alt-text is a riff on a chapter published by 37signals/Basecamp in “Getting Real” - “Three State Solution”. Scott covers this in a great post that I’d highly recommend. Every product manager and product designer needs to read and use this tool! What’s also great about this chapter is that Scott provides examples of these five states with popular products many of us use.

I’m reading several books right now on psychology and design. The seventh chapter “The Psychology of an Experience” is really good. It starts discussing the impact of UI resposiveness and speed on the overall user experience. Then Scott introduces the Fogg Behavior Model and the concepts of ‘triggers’, ‘abilities’, and ‘motivations’. Again, what follows are breakdowns of apps such as Uber, Tinder, Twitter, AirBnB, and other how these concepts are being implemented. The chapter closes with more discussion and examples of interface animation, interactions and microinteractions.

Product teams spend a lot of time looking at various qualitative and quantitative measures - at least they should be - to improve their product experience. There are a bunch of recommendations in “Interpreting Feedback and ‘Leveling Up’ Your Product” that are pragmatic and useful. There are understated topics in this chapter such as knowing who you are building product for and what their pains are. Scott references the book “Inside Intuit” with a key recommendation to build based on what customers do, not what they say. This is something most product teams struggle with especially when they are new to using qualitative discovery and testing approaches.

The last chapter “Shipping is an Art - and a Science” provides a good summary of the challenge that most products teams struggle with - when to ship. Product teams wait waaaaaaaaay to long to ship. If a company/startup doesn’t ship consistently, they won’t be around for long. This is how we learn. The rate at which a team ships is like your pulse: it should be pretty regular and is a good indicator of your health. That being said I do agree with Scott that you shouldn’t ship shit either.

It’s been a while since I initially read this book and writing this review. After writing this review, I really want to revisit many of the tips and recommendations that Scott provides and look at how I can get my teams to use these daily. I’ve ready most of the design books from O’Reilly and this one is by far the most important and actionable one. I’ve read quite a few other product-related books (I’ll try to review them as well) and this is head and shoulders above anything that I’ve read. Its pragmatics and features a lot of screenshots that backup and illustrate Scott’s point of view. Stop reading this and just go buy a copy now.