The Experience Stack
I use the word ‘product’ an awful lot. That’s because it’s a really good way to think about websites, services, media, gadgets and so on.
Products should be what toy companies call shelf-demonstrable—even sitting in a box in shop, a product can explain itself to the customer (or at least tell its simplest story in a matter of seconds). Organisationally, understanding a website or component of a mobile service as a product means being able to describe it in a single sentence, means understanding the audience, means focusing on a single thing well, means having ‘this is what we are here for’ as a mantra for the team, and it means being able to (formally or informally) have metrics and goals. Here’s it in a nutshell: You know it’s a product when it has an ethos—when the customers and the team know pretty much what the product would do in any given circumstance.
And what is it called when the user has a mental model of the product they can rely on? Implicature.
We know Flickr is a good product because when the implicature is violated – when Flickr does something people don’t expect, like abruptly deleting photos or forcing a bunch of people to change usernames – they get furious. People wouldn’t get so furious about a website they didn’t have such a strong mental model of.
Moving on again.