Does Your Product Create Value?

Value is the draw behind your product, the reason it will sell or attract users. It can help to periodically reflect on these questions:

• Does your product address a specific need, be it yours or someone else’s?
• Does your product satisfy the end user?
• Is your product something worth the time, money and/or attention of the end user?
• Is your product something you can be proud of?

The last question on that list is a bit more personal than logical, but I think a positive answer can help create the psychological devotion to your project that you need to get through more challenging times. The logic in creating value should apply to projects big and small, from something you do for yourself to building a scalable business that benefits others.

The key reminder to take away, at least for me, is to focus on that specific need and build a product centered around it. It’s easy to get lost in adding unnecessary features or attempting to do too much – find out what creates value for your users and home in on that. You can only create value for the user if they actually end up finding and using your solution, so follow-through is equally important.

Making An Impact

By providing a product or service to your end users, you are having an impact on their lives in one way or another. Making sure that the impact you have is both positive and significant can also go a long way in creating value. The greater the positive impact on the user, the more likely their lifetime value increases.

Value Creates Organic Growth

We humans are social animals, so sharing things we value is in our nature. If your product can have that significant, positive impact on your end user, they are much more likely to not only share it with friends, but convert them into paying customers.

Final Thoughts

These concepts are dead simple and fairly obvious but they can go a lot further than a business plan or an MBA if put to use. It’s essentially the same mantra followed by Y-Combinator and one that many others have preached and practiced: Make something people want.

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“I’m not artistic!”

This is the biggest excuse I hear from my programmer colleagues.  As much as we’d like to think so, being artistic is not an intrinsic ability, it is a learned skill that people must develop with a lot of time and diligence.  While it may be easier to tell yourself you’re not artistic and offset the responsibility to a contractor or friend, understanding what looks good, why it looks good and how to apply that knowledge has multiple benefits:

• Quality Control – Screen the work you receive from contractors
• User Experience – As the developer of the product, you have an understanding of why people will want to use it – applying this logic to your design will create a great user experience
• Cost-Effectiveness – Even if you end up outsourcing the bulk of your design work, use your design skills to create your marketing material (banner ads), letterheads and business cards
• Self-Reliance – While it is absolutely necessary to depend on others at one point or another, being able to develop and design your own product just feels good and allows you to maintain full control

Convinced?  Achieving great design can be just as rewarding as programming, and just as beneficial for your product.  Follow these steps and learn how to create successful design:

1. Draw in Your Spare Time

Take out a blank sheet of paper, pick up a pencil or pen, and draw the first still object you lay your eyes on (or anything else you’d like).  While it’s true you don’t have to be able to draw to make a great looking website, drawing is the single fastest way to improve your overall artistic abilities with relative ease.  What you draw and how you well you draw doesn’t matter yet – your goal is to learn the art of observation and imitation.  Web design often relies on taking bits and pieces of what we see around the web and applying it to something with your own style.  Play with shading, realism, cartoons or whatever keeps your interest level high – remember the key is practice and persistence.

2. Absorb Inspiration

Find great design and learn from it.  A good place to start is an established CSS gallery or design blog, such as CSS Remix and Smashing Magazine.  Spend time looking through multiple sites and resources, take notes (mental or real) and try to find trends and similarities between the sites.  To be featured on a high profile site they must be doing something right, so try to learn as much as you can from their examples.  Your goal in this step is to understand what information the site is trying to deliver to you and what artistic and design trends they use to do so.

3. Learn From Tutorials

The Tuts+ network is a great resource and provides tutorials for everything from Photoshop to After Effects.  Take something you found to be very cool in one of the inspirational sites you’ve previously encountered and find a tutorial for making it (or something similar).  This will not only allow you to apply that technique to your own project but also teach you a multitude of other skills you’ll use in getting to the end result.

4. Practice What You Learn

Take a Photoshop tutorial and follow along with it in Photoshop, or even try to improve on the end result.  Find an incredible looking site and try to rebuild it in Photoshop, just to see if you can.  All good developers have one thing in common: experience, and this is what you’re trying to achieve with by practicing these design skills.  Start small by designing a button or logo, then move on to a complete mockup of a fake product (or your real one if you’d like).  Just like in programming you will undoubtedly go through multiple iterations of your work, hopefully improving on each one.

5. Apply Logic

Just like you would in programming, use your smarts when designing a website.  Keep in your mind the end goals, who your website is aimed at (target audience) and how to portray what you have to say in such a way that you engage your audience.  Web design can be fun and colorful but it can also be smart and targeted, and your goal is the latter of the two.

Conclusion

The point of this article is not for you to stop outsourcing your design work, or drop your designer cofounder in favor of doing it yourself.  Rather it is to help you better understand that you are capable and if you have time, take small steps to make yourself a better designer.  Follow the above steps, find more inspirational resources and keep practicing what you learn and you’ll be on your way to better design in no time.  Also, subscribe to our feed for more articles, resources and tutorials posted every week!

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