Good Product Design is..

Good Product Design is…well, many things..

I’ve spent over a decade firmly entrenched in Industrial Design projects, and have made the decision to begin a natural pivot into Digital Product Design to continue my own journey. I was recently asked a simple series of questions around “good” Product Design, and why we’re attracted to it. For me, the answer has always started and ended with helping others. I find it profoundly rewarding to be able to work closely with other human beings, understand their pains, frustrations and moments of joy, and craft meaningful experiences that alter the course of their lives, however big or small. There are a lot of products in my life that I could say that about, but when I think about the digital space, there’s one that I’ve been using for a while that I’ve found profoundly good, and that app is Noom. When I think about what makes a product great rather than simply good, it comes down to the careful consideration of both the tangible and intangible needs of the user. It’s not simply enough to understand the functional specifications that a product needs in order to perform well for the end user, but also how that product makes them feel, and what positive emotions we can elicit through crafting meaningful bonds to the product. Noom has mastered this quite intentionally, through considering not only the simple mechanics of tracking nutritional intake in an app, but also through combining those moments of tracking with notes of encouragement, education and demystification of the otherwise complicated and frustrating task of modifying nutritional behavior and/or trying to lose weight.

They’ve combined the psychology of good habit building and mindset change with the basic functional activity of tracking food intake, and it’s been a profound change for me as a person. The app has successfully and fundamentally changed my relationship with food for the better, which is about as innovative as one could get in this space.

But not all apps are so altruistic. Many of them are designed for the sole purpose of keeping you habituated to constant use without any meaningful positive benefit. In other words, addicted. An app for me that fits this description well is Facebook. No doubt, Facebook (now Meta) has gotten a fairly bad rap of late, and deservedly so. Their ability to infiltrate your online behaviors and activities, and then craft bespoke experiences with surgically accurate advertisements keeps one scrolling, day after day, after day. This app really serves very few meaningful purposes for me daily, and I’ve forced myself to keep the app deleted on my device to avoid the time-wasting activities that it would otherwise create.

Design can be a power for good, or a power for the not-so-good. It’s up to us as designers to keep our ethics pointed in the right direction.