@andrewchen

The “Ultimate Driving Machine” is a classic slogan that makes BMW compete based on position, not features.

It’s hard to keep things simple, especially when adding so many new features
In my recent post on the virtues of marketing simple products, a couple readers wrote in to write a really interesting questions – here’s a particularly interesting one by Mark Hull:

How do you ensure that by simplifying your product too much, you are not losing a competitive edge by a lack of additional features/functions?

Every product team struggles with this question- it seems like naturally adding more featureset adds more power to the product, yet at the same time adds complexity that makes it hard for new users to even get started. This is a common problem in the initial version of a product, because most of the time the first version doesn’t work, and the most obvious way to solve the problem is to just keep adding features until it starts to click. Yet does this ever work?

Don’t compete on features. If your core concept isn’t working, rework the description of the product rather than adding new stuff.

Make sure you’re creating a product that competes because it’s taking a fundamentally different position in the market. If the market is full of complex, enterprise tools, then make a simpler product aimed at individuals. If the market is made up of fancy, high-end wines, then create one that’s cheaper, younger, and more casual. If the market is full of long-form text blogging tools, then make one that makes it easy to communicate in 140 character bursts. If computers are techy and cheap, then make one that’s human and more premium. These ideas are not about features, these are fundamentally different positions in the market.

BMW is the Ultimate Driving Machine
My favorite example of differentiated market positioning in a very crowded market is BMW’s “Ultimate Driving Machine” slogan. It’s not just a marketing message, you know it’s true when you sit inside a BMW and turn on the engine. Among other things, you’ll notice that:

• The center console is aimed towards you, the driver
• The window controls are next to your stick so it’s easier for your right hand*
• … and obviously the remarkable driving experience

Furthermore, when you go to the dealership, the entire experience keeps reinforcing the “Ultimate Driving Machine” message. The point is, the positioning is about the driving experience and the engineering to back that up.

In a price and features comparison, it’s unlikely that BMW would ever come on top- it’s expensive, and very little of the money goes into the interior and niceties that you’d expect out of a Mercedes. Yet people end up buying BMWs not for the features, but because it’s a fundamentally different car than a Mercedes (or at least it feels that way).

I’ve always felt that Apple goes this way too, where their products are more expensive and often do a lot less than competitive devices, yet win because they have a more cohesive design intention across their whole UX. Again, the idea here is more about competing via a differentiated positioning rather than based on a feature checklist.

You’ll never win on features against a market leader
The other important part to remember is that for the most part, if there’s a winning product X on the market, you’re unlikely to win by creating the entire featureset of X+1 by adding more features. Here’s why:

• First off, that’s crazy because you have to build a fully featured product right away, and that might already take years to match a market leader
• Secondly, as described in the Innovator’s Dilemma, if you’re mostly copying the market leader and then adding features, those features are likely to be sustaining innovations that is likely on the incumbents roadmap already- by the time you’re done, they’ll either have it or just copy you

Instead, the idea is to have a simpler product that attacks the low-end of the market leader’s product by taking a completely different market positioning. That way, you don’t have to build a fully featured product and you can take a completely different design intention, which leads to a disruptive innovation.

Ramifications for startups building initial versions of a product
I think there are three key ramifications for teams building the first version of a product.

The first is: Don’t compete on features. Find an interesting way to position yourself differently – not better, just differently – than your competitors and build a small featureset that addresses that use case well. Then once you get a toehold in the market, you can figure out what to do there. This doesn’t mean that new features are inherently bad, of course- they are fine, as long as they support the differentiation that you’re promising.

The second thing is: If your product initially doesn’t find a fit in the market (as is common), don’t react by adding additional new features to “fix” the problem. That rarely works. Instead, rethink how you’re describing the product and how you deliver differentiated value in the first 30 seconds. Rework the core of the experience and build a roadmap of new features that reflects the differentiated positioning. Avoid add-ons.

The third is: Make sure your product reflects the market positioning- this isn’t just marketing you know! If your product is called the Ultimate Driving Machine, don’t just slap that onto your ads and call it a day. Instead, bring that positioning into the core of your product so that it’s immediately obvious to anyone using it- it’s only in that way your product will be fundamentally differentiated from the start.

* UPDATE: An astute reader, Greg Eoyang, pointed out that the modern generation BMWs (E90s) are different now- I have an E46 that’s a few years old, so I was basing my observation on that. He writes:

First of all, a most modern BMWs do not have the window controls near the stick, that’s like 2 generations old, they are on the windows just like Honda’s these days.  BMW doesn’t even tell you about a lot of the features that have been standard for a long time – such as speed variable volume on the radios – Wide Open Throttle switch (back in the non-CPU days, it cut off the air conditioner when you floored it) – They have improved the concept of a car which is more than the features.

Thanks for the additions Greg!

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This is reposted from my answer on Quora here.

Question: What UX considerations were built into Google+?
The most interesting design choice I’ve seen for G+ has been deploying it across all the Google properties within a navbar, and via the notifications – I’m talking about this thing right here:

(btw, looking at it now, I notice it’s the same coloring scheme as Quora, hilarious)

Building G+ on top of pre-existing, high-retention products
Obviously this is a smart decision because it lets them build on top of their own high-retention, pre-existing products: Google Search and Gmail, in particular. Contrast this to an approach where they would have started up G+ as its own independent property, which Google users could choose to adopt or not- but then that looks like Orkut.

Anyway, as a result of adding this new global navbar across all the Google properties, they have to deal with a very small amount of real estate to create some pretty rich interactions. Thus, it was very interesting to then see them building a mobile-like interface for interacting with comments, follows, etc., inline, without leaving whatever experience you’re already in:

And if you click on any of these, you see a quick sliding motion that lets you interact with the different notifications inline, without going anywhere:

Contrasting with Facebook
In comparison, the Facebook notifications dropdown is almost more like a inbox of “pointers” to the actual content. As a result, while you can see what’s new, you can’t actually do anything about it without leaving where you are. I found this a nice interaction on G+’s part given that they are building on top of things like email or search where you may not want to leave yet.

Someone should obviously do a much longer design discussion of the G+ main site, but I personally found the new navbar and notifications system pretty interesting so I thought I’d write a bit about it.

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Simple products aren’t only better designed, they’re easier to market too.
Marketing and product UX are seen as conflicting with one another, but there are, in fact, many opportunities for the two to work together. Some of the best tools for increasing metrics are the same ones that are used to create effective interaction designs. These techniques include things like adding “soft” onboarding experiences, stripping out unnecessary features, having clear visual hierarchy and calls to action, and many more tactics. Ultimately, these tactics serve to create simple product experiences that are both desirable and well-optimized.

Let’s explore the different reasons why simplicity is a virtue for both designers and marketing quants.

Highly optimized flows make it easy to understand “what do I do next?”
Every product lives and dies based on how well new users are able to sign up and get oriented with the product’s core value. High signup and onboarding rates depend on a large % of users completing each step.

As a result, it’s important for each page to be as simple and directed as possible, so it’s constantly obvious what to do next. If each page gives the user too many options, thus distracting from the primary goal of the funnel, then the %s will decrease. As a result, some of the best landing pages and funnels fundamentally depend on extremely simple, stripped down designs. Here, removing things like navigation chrome, extraneous links, etc is not only simpler, but also better performing from a metrics standpoint.

More data and faster learning cycles
A metrics-informed team depends on deploying A/B tests and evaluating the results as the core of their product iteration process. Early on however, you often don’t have enough users to quickly evaluate tests at a statistically significant level. This data is then further diluted when you have a complex featureset, since only a small % of users interact with each option. However, if you have a simple product, where almost 100% of the users go through the same signup, invite, and sharing flows, then you’ll be able to collect data sooner and thus make decisions faster too.

This is a huge advantage because when you can run A/B tests in 3 days instead of 9 days, for instance, you can learn 3x faster and find product breakthroughs sooner. Think about this like compounding interest in the bank- finding 10% improvements faster leads to exponentially better performance.

Simple products are easier to optimize and pivot
Ultimately, it’s the optimized flow through your product that wins – you don’t get any credit for complexity. One optimized funnel beats any number of unoptimized funnels, because you only get credit for average conversion rate across all the funnels. Thus, more funnels means that on a practical level, it’s harder to keep them all optimized. It’s easier and better to push users through a small number of signup flows that you can keep well-designed and well-optimized, so that the overall quality stays high.

This is especially true if you decide to make some product changes in a classic “pivot,” or otherwise test significant new additions in a signup funnel like adding Facebook sign-on. If you have a simple product with a small number of onboarding flows, then it’s easy to experiment to see if it’ll work, collect data quickly, and then add it to 100% of new users’ experiences. Contrast this to a complex product where shifting the design takes a lot of time because you have to update so many different places in the product.

Keeps the focus on top of funnel rather than low-impact add-ons

When a product isn’t working, often the knee-jerk response is to “fully bake” the product by adding more features. However, I’ve found that when examining the data of new startups, the problem most often lies on the first couple pages of a product- often an unattractive value proposition, or clunky signup flow that kills the new user experience. Adding metrics to simple products often makes it clear exactly what’s going on, and most of the time, it’s a fundamental issue that needs to be fixed on the first page.

In this way, simple products with the “right” value prop will end up with better signup rates- this lets you put your attention on top-of-funnel issues rather than low-impact feature add-ons that won’t 10x the destiny of your product.

Short funnels result in more conversions
One of the most powerful things you can do to a key product flow is to shorten it*. Generally, because you lose a % of users at each step, reducing the amount of work to get started is a highly effective tool- rather than presenting a complicated homepage and asking for tons of information upfront from a user, perhaps you just let them signup with Facebook- that might reduce the number of steps, leading to a simpler product and better metrics too.

Ultimately, this all aligns with the highly opinionated design ethos that prioritizes what users most often want to do, rather than presenting many options equally. As is discussed in the Palm story in the book “Designing Interactions” the features of a product are used in a Power Law distribution- a small number of features are used constantly and the rest are long tail. As a result, you want to make the most commonly used features convenient while putting the unused features available but hidden.

(*in some outliers, lengthening signup flows with the right steps can help too)

Increasing the prominence of high-value actions by removing low-value actions
One of the most common (bad) design patterns I see among metrics-oriented products is continually layering more and more prominent calls to action for sharing or other viral mechanics. This got especially bad in early Facebook apps. The problem is that the user’s attention is easily diluted, and each new feature competes with the last- as a result, after a few iterations of this, it’s pretty easy to end up with a frankenstein of a product that’s cluttered and messy.

Instead, a compelling tool is to remove features in order to make what remains more prominent. Instead of making the high-value actions bolded and highlighted in yellow, simply remove the actions that are no longer necessary. This leads to both a simpler product experience as well as raised prominence for whatever actions you want to emphasize.

Conclusion- let’s make design and metrics work together
Ultimately, the key to the tools above are that they increase the effectiveness of the UI while simultaneously increasing the metrics. This can happen because highly optimized products are dead simple to use- they have landing pages that communicate a compelling value, soft onboarding flows, clear calls to action, and simple mechanics that drive a lot of value. The same things that make it a highly marketable product are the same things that make it well-designed, and a great thing for which every product should strive.

To use these tools effectively, those who are metrics-informed must also become design-informed. While it’s obvious that you can increase the prominence of something by making it blink and highlighted in red, there are many more tasteful tools that lead to less visual clutter and provide an even greater metrics benefit. Even Dave McClure!

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