How to fix plumbing or the Product Design Method

Hi, I’m Alex, a Digital Product Designer from Ukraine. I have long wanted to explain to my parents what I do. I succeeded thanks to a good metaphor. Now I want to share this metaphor with you: businessmen, managers of digital businesses. Use this method when setting tasks for your designers and developers. Give these principles to everyone on the team to read. After a few iterations, you’ll already have your own team of product designers. They may not be superstars, but they will definitely make your business richer.

Let’s imagine that a business is a pipeline, and profit is the flow of water from the faucet. Sometimes there are holes in the pipeline and leaks occur. For this reason, less water flows from the tap. Generally, your business can look like a pipeline with many leaks. For a business to be profitable, you usually don’t need to patch all the holes. It is enough to find the worst leaks that are easy to fix.

💦 How do you find that leak?

Imagine that the pipeline is your website. You need to see the entire flow of users who use your site to pick out the most important leak.

Create a funnel:

1. Walk around the site
2. Build a map of it
3. Build a funnel using Google analytics
4. Wait for the data to accumulate
5. Choose the place where users go to the next step of the funnel the least, that is, find the leak

You don’t really have to, and you can turn a blind eye to all the leaks. Try to find the problem in another way: see how your product is being used, take a survey on the website.

🎤 What to do about the leak?

You need to figure out what the problem is with the leak. Why your customers are “leaking” out of the pipeline, why they are not going further down the funnel.

First way: Observe

1. Say what task people usually come to your site with
2. Ask someone you know to come to your site and do the task
3. Don’t prompt, just observe.
4. Ask clarifying questions, such as why aren’t you moving on to the next step?
5. Determine a list of leaks and choose one

You can involve people you know in the testing. See how they use the site and ask them at what point they have difficulty

Second way: Ask

1. Formulate your questions
2. Add a questionnaire to the site (use Hotjar)
3. Analyze the answers
4. Identify the leak

Using simple questions you can’t always get up-to-date information because of the cognitive distortions of our brains. No one will tell you the truth unless you ask tricky questions. We as humans always want to seem better.

👎 A simple question:

• Do you like our site?
• Will you recommend the site to your friends?
• Will you subscribe to our social media?

👍 Tricky question:

• What task do you usually come to the site with?
• What challenges do you encounter when you solve a task?
• How do you imagine the ideal solution to this task?

💡 How do you come up with a patch?

Once you’ve found the leak, you need to put a patch that’s the right shape and made of a reliable material. But any variant will do for starters.

1. Write out the problems you learned above
2. Think of “How could we?” questions for each problem
3. Come up with several problem-solving ideas for each question
4. Choose 1–2 ideas, they should be simple and effective at first glance

If you feel like something weird is going on, that’s fine, our goal is to find out how this idea works as soon as possible.

🔎 How do you check a patch?

The main value of this approach is the mistakes and the conclusions you can draw after you’ve made them. To patch a leak faster, the patch can be made from a simple material: a 3D-printed plastic, for example, rather than factory-molded metal. In other words, don’t create a perfect design for your idea, just communicate it in the most affordable way possible.

There are two ways to check the idea: a temporary code on the site, a prototype in Figma.

First way:

1. Write out 1–2 ideas you came up with above
2. Write a temporary code to put the idea on the site
3. Run the A/B experiment in google optimize OR add it to the site right away
4. Compare how the flow has changed after a few days

Second way:

1. Write out 1–2 ideas you came up with above
2. Draw a non-perfect design in Figma
3. Invite your client to a call
4. Show the screen
5. Outline the task that customers usually do through your site
6. Before going to the next page, ask, “what do you expect to see on the next page?”
7. If the customer is having difficulty ask “why?”
8. After the meeting, write down any difficulties the customer encountered

🤔 What’s next?

This whole thing was for this moment: You have the information. Now make a decision. Use your post-testing knowledge in your decision-making.

• Is this patch okay? If it already increases the flow from the faucet, then fine.
• Do you need to check another patch? Did you find out that the other patch is more suitable? Then try applying it.
• No patch fits? If you realize that all the patches don’t fit and it takes a long time to find the right one, then find a leak that you can handle

Almost all products on the market are leaky pipelines. If you want to, in your product, the user will always find a hole to slip into. Your job is not to make the pipeline perfect, but to increase its efficiency. Apply 20% effort to get 80% of the results.

In fact, if you have leaking piping, it’s going to cause a lot of problems for you and your neighbors. But let’s allow that nuance in favor of a good metaphor.

It may turn out that in that place of the pipeline is not just a leak, a real disaster: a whole pipe connection is missing. That is, a whole section should be added to the site. For example, comments on products. But this is the next level of product development. If you want to continue — leave a comment or write to pirus981@gmail.com.

P.S. Product designers in this metaphor are like plumbers. They will quickly find a patch, come up with a good solution. All you have to do is pay.

Chief Editor: Evgeniy Zlatov