Differentiating Great vs Good Product Design Talent: Graduating Complexity

Looking for a way to differentiate great from good when hiring product design talent? Ask them about graduating complexity across a customer journey.

Here are some ideas for guiding that conversation:

For a Mobile App

Ask them to imagine that they need to create a home screen experience for a restaurant booking app where research has shown that user behavior is a strong function of their location and the time of day. Further, let them know that they have a data science team that's world class at recommendation systems and that people are rather predictable when it comes to the ways they eat out.

• A great product designer will immediately begin talking about a prominent map metaphor, but will recognize that they can't exclusively use a map metaphor. A great answer is that they'll make a map "preview" (smaller and non-interactive) the most prominent element of the experience.
• They should talk about a prominent simplified search UI metaphor that allows for defining and remembering the How Many, When, and Where with sensible mobile defaults like 2, Now, and Nearby.
• Knowing they have great Recommendations/Personalization design material to work with, a great designer will likely talk about excerpting the best (most actionable) of that material in a mini-widget in the default experience, but will recognize that most of that material would be more appropriately aggregated into an always visible labelled affordance (like a Discover tab).

Note: This example describes a recent redesign by OpenTable as described in this post.

For an E-Commerce Site

Ask them to imagine a brand new user coming from search that's expressed a strong intent for purchasing your products. Further, tell them that the availability of the product depends on the users location and how they want the product delivered. (At a given time, the product might not be available in the user's zip or it might only be available through say shipping, not pickup.)

• A great product designer is going to communicate that you would never foist all of that inherent complexity on a new user on the landing page and that you wouldn't do it for every product they will purchase in that visit. You should immediately hear/see them describing how they'd graduate (and aggregate) that complexity.
• A great product designer will likely also imagine at least one way in which the app will fail this user and talk about contingencies for dealing with that failure.

Note: This example comes from my own work as described in detail in this article.

For a Sign Up Experience

Ask them to imagine a sign-up experience where, in order to provide great personalization/recommendations, a rich profile is needed—say 8-10 inputs in addition to the standard authentication inputs.

• A great product designer is going to recognize that asking for all 8-10 additional inputs in sign-up would cause sign-up rates to drop significantly and immediately begin thinking about ways to graduate the complexity of sign-up.
• There are numerous approaches for collecting the additional profile info, but a great product designer is likely going to a) discuss the option of annotating the UI affordance that takes users to the existing profile editing UI (while the profile info is <xx% complete) or b) adding UI immediately after login to ask for the profile info (also while the profile info is <xx% complete). For a), a clever approach would be to make this part of the product tour functionality.

Have an example of where you or your team thought deeply about graduating complexity across a customer journey? I'd love to know. Hit me up in the comments!