De Amicis

Build your products with Energy, Structure, and Empathy

How to show the many ways your product helps your customers

Episode #10 of the Tiny Graphics Advent Calendar, published by Marius Popescu for De Amicis.

What is the value of a gift? If it’s big, expensive, or rare, it has a great value, and if not, then it represents a small value. Right?

What you need to remember is that customers are first and foremost people. They have feelings, are busy, tired, alone, happy. And they are running around doing a thousand small things at this time of the year.

Even if your product is helping them doing their job better, faster and more cost-effective, there are other ways it can serve them.

Solution completed by training and customer support
Your customers need solutions for their problems, but they also need to be taught, helped or just to be heard.

The one thing a product should do, apart from what it already does, it is to be easy to learn. You can add secondary features (or graphics) to your product to help the users do a better job.

iA Writer Style Check
The iA Writer Style Check function helps writers learn how to write better. The proposed improvements are visually suggested in the text being edited.

How easy to learn is your product?

Developers are a proud bunch, they love to say that their products are so simple, clear and easy to use, that people don’t need any training. Except when you show their interfaces to a designer you see there is work to do. And when you see someone using your software, still more work to do.

If you want to focus on easy to use metrics, you can start inside the software. Begin to teach the users easier steps to take to do their job. Explain what happened. Show how to revert decisions. Make them comfortable.

That can go further, you can have a help dashboard inside the software, showing the 5 best things a user can learn to better use it.

Furthermore, you can publish the results of this teaching, as the 5 best features any user should learn to greatly increase the value they get from the software.

JetBrains products (mainly for developers, the irony) often show the keyboard shortcuts the user could have used instead using the mouse, right after an action. This continuously informs and trains your users.

Your turn now

Think of 3 tiny and useful features you would teach your customers.

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

For my 40 years anniversary I got a Porsche. I know, so cliché. Even though it was a small toy, it had a great value by what it the symbolized.