Digital Product Management: Design websites and mobile apps that exceed expectations (Voices That Matter)

The premise of a user journey map is that a user has a series of goals she’s trying to achieve when encountering an organization and its products. Stepping back from existing or planned products, what are these goals? And what is their sequence?

Heuristic evaluation is a usability research method in which professional evaluators review a product to determine how well it complies with generally accepted user interface design principles

A competitor-driven analysis compares the similarities and differences of your organization and your competitors. As Brown points out, competitor-driven analysis is effective at informing strategy broadly and at comparing specific features and design solutions

Adoption and use

The point of a prototype is never to look good, it’s to communicate ideas for the purpose of additional experimentation.

Basic: The customer would be neutral about the feature being there, but very dissatisfied if it were missing.
Performance: The customer would be satisfied if the feature were there, but dissatisfied if it were missing.
Delightful: The customer would be satisfied if the feature were there, but neutral if it were missing.

The most important thing to recognize about performance attributes is that they’re not nearly as universal as basic attributes

As long as your priorities are based on customer needs and market problems, your approach to websites and mobile apps can vary slightly. Just make sure that you’re careful when you prioritize, and structure the needs in a way that enables you to meet essential ones first, then others later.

Think about where your current websites or mobile apps fit into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Do they support the base of the pyramid, a higher but less critical level of needs, or a range of needs? Knowing this should help you set expectations for use and satisfaction.
Similarly, if you’re assessing a new product opportunity for a client or trying to discern what kind of site or app to design on your own, determine what type of needs it could meet. Could it satisfy fundamental needs or higher-level needs? Could it be used by a broad range of users or just a niche?

User stories should be free of creative and technical solutions. They need to remain pure and focus on human,