10 must-have qualities of a good product

No matter if you are a UX designer, a product manager or a UI designer. Jeff Davidson’s article The 10 Commandments of Good Products is a must read. Period.

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash

However, in today’s post we are going to summarize it. These 10 qualities are:

1. Easy to use: simplifying an annoying task to make it easier to perform or even making it enjoyable will make your user love your products even more. Good examples are Netflix or Spotify, but there are also great examples of good products in the B2B world, such as Typeform, that helps users to create forms easily.
2. Focused value: focus on one thing, and make it shine. Your good old Bialetti coffee-maker can be a good example of this: there are even people who carry them on their trips.
3. It lasts: we are not talking about planned obsolescence, but about the design. Good products will be easy to recognize, no matter how they evolve. Cars are a good example: think of a Porsche 911 Carrera or a VW Kombi.
4. A unique design appeal: good products are not only easy to recognize but attract the attention of any person around. Think of Google’s homepage: if you visit any other search engine, you will notice some similarities, if not a resemblance close to copycatness.
5. Intuitiveness: good products don’t need any instruction book. Original Macintosh is a great example of this: its graphic UI changed the way we use computers.
6. Efficiency: high resources vs. value ratio defines a good product, not only when it comes to the materials, but also from the team that actually designed it. Good products will not unnecessary extra pieces or ornaments.
7. It is visceral: as stated by Don Norman in his Emotional Design book, a good product has to move users’ feelings. Even if your product is efficient and intuitive, if it doesn’t hit hard in the user’s heart, it’s not a good product.
8. It satisfies the “seeking system”: we, humans, have a mental system named seeking system that makes us continuously explore the world around us. Instagram or non-stop scroll websites are a good example.
9. It’s an expression of the user: humans always try to express themselves by the products they use, so a good product will always bring this into consideration, even above rational concerns. Think of a Harley: you, as a customer, can almost craft your very own one with all the available options to personalize it.
10. Helps people: a good product will make people’s lives better. You can simplify a tedious task by thinking about how to achieve that and how to prevent errors.

All these ten commandments make good products, regardless being digital or not: they are just products. This is the reason why we, at Torresburriel Estudio, always insist on one idea: that making people’s lives better is what user experience is all about.

This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:

Diez características de un buen producto | Torresburriel Estudio