I was once walking a new designer through our B2B product.
There was a page where all the users were listed. If you wanted to edit details of a user, you would click on the name. An overlay would open and you could re-enter the specific piece of info.
She argued that it was poor and outdated design.
She wasn’t wrong.
The design required the users to take extra few steps, just to be able to edit a piece of info. This was a step backward.
Most popular apps allowed inline edits.
For example, this is how you edit the task title in ClickUp
.
This is a sleek design. It greatly reduces the effort on the user’s part.
Yet, we didn’t redesign the “edit experience” in our app.
That’s because the UX decisions are not absolute. They are always contextual.
The level of “refined-ness” a user expects from a product depends on one thing - how well does a product do its core job compared to other solutions?
If the product does the core “functional” job very well, the users don’t mind less than ideal user experience.
They still find the product valuable.
For example, let’s say I was developing a new task tracking app.
There are so many task management apps out there. They all do, more or less, a very good job of allowing me to track my tasks. The user experience is sleek as well.
If I launch another task tracking app that doesn’t have better user experience, the user is going to close the tab within the five seconds.
ClickUp cannot compete with JIRA simply by introducing standard task management capabilities.
On the other hand, if my app did a job that no other app does as effectively, the user might actually continue to use it even if the design isn’t as sleek.
The app I was working on was helping machine learning engineers do a very specific task related to data annotation. The user didn’t mind a relatively steeper learning curve because the core job was was very specialized and app did it very well.
Aesthetically pleasing design or sleek user experience was desirable but the lack of it was not a deal breaker.
I am not suggesting that you should settle with a sloppy user experience.
What I am suggesting is that the importance of each product design decision depends on the context. There are times when you must focus on making the product easier to use. There are times when it’s more worthwhile to focus on making the core job more effective.
It all depends.
The user’s expectations from a product exist in the form of the ladder. The earlier steps need to be fulfilled before the later steps become important.
If the product doesn’t even run or doesn’t solve my problem, it doesn’t matter how sleek the UI is. On the other hand, if the app runs and solves my problem very well, I might be okay with a less than ideal user experience.
As a product manager, it’s your job to weigh in the context and decide the best user of your time, money, and resources