Gary Murray – Product Lead

Gary Murray

  • Conversational design

    I read Die Dashboards Die – by Nir Eyal recently and it resonated with me – but it also got me thinking about how some of this could be applied to traditional web design.

    Personally, I feel that for too long now websites have just been a way of taking what would have been your printed marketing brochure and putting it online for anyone to see. We’ve replaced the job of the traditional salesman with Google search results, no longer do we have someone cold calling customers or driving from town to town meeting with prospective clients, instead we have optimised our sites to appear in search engines for favourable terms and then created funnels to see how well we convert these prospects once they reach our online brochures (websites).

    Surely it’s time we moved beyond the traditional approach of a logo, menu, hero section, h1, intro text, icon, h4, paragraph, button, etc? Just taking a look at various ‘web design’ inspiration sites one can see that most sites all look the same, with the only real difference being how meticulously the visual design has been crafted.

    Maybe (most) websites will essentially become some form of a live chat interface, where the website acts more as an enabler, rather than a passive arrangement of images and text? Where we will be talking to a website, rather than moving a mouse around a screen and clicking on a button based on its color. We can already do a lot of this with bots on our phones, but when will we see major changes in the way we are designing websites? How can your websites desktop experience complement and build on the experience of your customers interaction with your more ‘intelligent’ mobile experiences? If I find some good examples of this I will be sure to post a follow-up to this.

  • 6 things I learnt from ‘hustling’

    Hustle is a popular tech/startup term – but I have never really seen anyone explain what they did when they were hustling – you just hear them say they ‘hustled’ and then they were ‘successful’. It tends to be defined as:

    Anything you need to do to make money… if you making money, you hustling.

    In mid 2014 I found myself with my back against the wall so to speak – work was scarce, most of my clients had gone very quiet and we had actually just bought a new family home (living in a 2 bedroom townhouse was not sustainable) – and we were moving in at the end of the month with no sign of my next ‘pay check’. My wife is a stay-at-home mom too – so there was no paycheck to rely on there either!

    As a result of these circumstances I found myself having to find a way to make some money – and make it fast.

    I started out by scanning the conversations, posts and articles of the people I followed on the internet to find opportunities that aligned with my key strengths/skill-set – and remembered a few posts I had read on the Creative Market blog earlier in the year where they had started to share what some of their shop owners were earning selling on Creative Market – as I already had a shop on Creative Market I decided to give it a second chance.

    For some background – I started my Creative Market shop early – just after they had launched and felt I saw an opportunity to create design related templates for the new launched Sketch software which was starting to become very popular as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. I spent a good few evenings and weekend working on a mobile UI kit based on the then iOS 6 – and launched it – expecting great success – and it did get some immediate sales – but literally within days Apple upgraded to iOS 7 and with it came a whole new visual style – which my UI kit no longer catered to – and my sales stopped immediately. At this stage, I was contracted to work with a company – and the thought of having to do all the work over again and use up my evenings and weekends was not that appealing – so I put my Creative Market shop on ice.

    Fast forward to 2014 – and I felt I would have a go at creating some products that I could sell on my Creative Market shop again – but I needed to make sure that the products I created could be made quickly so that I could generate sales across a range of products as soon as possible – and so I ended up having to ‘hustle’.

    Now more than a year later I thought I would share my experience on what it meant to hustle:

    H – Hard work
    It’s important to realise that making anything of value is going to take hard work – you can try make a product quickly – but if you want to really ensure your product will stand out and be recognised then you going to need to put in the hard work it deserves. It also means not making sure you have all the perfect tools for the job – I used the old floor in my new house as the backdrop, collected items from my in-laws collection (they hoard stuff) and took photographs over the weekends while my two children had their afternoon sleep – trying to make sure I did not wake them up in the process as I crept around the wooden floor and making sure the photographing session was done by the time they woke up.

    U – Understand
    Try to understand the mindset of your customer – put yourself in their shoes and look at what value your product brings to them – will it make their life easier, simpler – can they design faster with your product etc?

    S – Strengths
    Don’t try to create products around a style that you aren’t familiar with as your first products – identify what your strengths are – and play to them – you will find you can get your products out much faster. If you still having to learn on the job, it’s not impossible, it just makes it that little bit harder.

    T – Trust
    At some point along the way you are going to have to trust the decisions you have made. Not every product or idea you come up with will be right. Just don’t give up at the first roadblock you experience. Learn from it and don’t do it again.

    L – Luck
    As you go you will start to find new doors and opportunities opening along the way for your ideas and or products. Don’t be shy – seize them and enjoy your success.

    E – Enjoy
    Lastly, and most importantly – make sure that you are actually enjoying what you are doing – as your customers will see your enjoyment through the time and effort you are putting into your products and the way you interact with them.

    In the end, I made quite a bit of money during this period – and while hustling was great – it’s not something I feel you can sustain for a long period of time. I used the opportunity that I got from my sales to pursue other ideas and options and a year later find myself working as part of a great team on some really amazing products – applying a lot of what I learnt during that period of my life to my day-to-day job.

  • Build the company you wouldn’t sell

    I watched this talk ‘Build the company that you wouldn’t sell‘ by Zach Klein and it aligned well with this talk I watched by David Hieatt around the concept of doing one thing well.

    It seems as though the norm these days when building a company is to start building it with your exit strategy in place before you even start thinking about your product or even your customers.

    It would be interesting to be able to fast forward a few years and see where most of these products are – or maybe we should look back at some examples of companies or products that have been sold or acquired and see how many of them still exist or are continuing with the original vision – or was the product they sold in fact their customer base – rather than the actual product their customers bought?

     

  • Decision fatigue

    Early this year I was part of a discussion around ‘how many design options to present’ and the topic of decision fatigue came up. Decision fatigue is defined as:

    Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual, after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making.

    Wikipedia

    It got me thinking about the role of decision fatigue in design and further, eCommerce. The popularity and continuing emergence of ‘curated’ product offerings is a clear indication that consumers are faced with too many decisions – and they are now happy to allow a company or service to help them make these decisions. Companies are continuing to invest in building ‘intelligent’ systems that leverage the data they have on our behavior to automatically curate our experience – thus reducing the number of options we are presented with and ultimately the number of decisions we need to make. As a result eCommerce has transformed from being a – come and look at everything we have process to rather a let me recommend the right products to the right customer at the right time process.

    I would suggest that as designers and product managers we need to start including a decision fatigue audit as part of our design process – and not just looking at the final product page – but rather the entire decision making process and see how we can better understand the products we are selling, the differences between them – and look at ways to better recommend these products to the customer – either by using data tools available to you – or by being bold and simplifying the options and pre-empting their decisions. Rather let you customer say yes or no –  instead of I don’t know.

    Research suggests that our short-term memory capacity allows us to simultaneously consider 6-9 choices – maximum – without starting to suffer from decision fatigue. I recommend walking through your product as a user to see how well your design accommodates this research. It’s also important to understand that choice doesn’t only relate to content – the more complex your navigation and interface is the more time it takes a user to understand how it works, and what to do next.

  • Engineering Happiness

    As part of joining Automattic – you are required to spend your first three weeks in product support. I was recently part of the first group of the WooThemes team to do the 3 week Support Rotation and it gave me some key insights into customer behaviour – as well as my own behaviour  – and the way one markets/presents a product:

    Engineer customer happiness and reduce open tickets.

    As a happiness engineer – you are given all the tools at your disposal to help a customer with a query – as such your job it to engineer happiness for that customer using the tools at your disposal. But having said that you have to also weigh up customer happiness vs business interests – i.e. you would not just be able to refund every customer who asked for a refund with the line ‘but it will make them happy!” and realistically feel you are doing a good job. When I thought about this as a product manager I felt I could apply this same thinking to bring clarity to an often ‘grey’ job title: engineer customer happiness in a product while reducing the number of feature requests either through inclusion or exclusion.

    Just because there is information online – don’t assume the customer will actually try find it first, and if they have found it, don’t expect them to have read it. And if they have read it don’t expect them to have understood it.

    As a Happiness Engineer it’s your job to find the answers to the questions a customer has – often this means referencing articles that they could have as easily found as you. But, you can never expect your customer to have found these articles, let alone read it, and how about understanding them? So if you start finding that you replying to the same questions over and over again – maybe you should have a look at how and where you are addressing these issues in your products design and or messaging.

    Don’t assume you have the answer to a customers question until you fully understand the problem they are facing.

    We can often start telling a customer what we think they want to hear, or even more so what we want them to hear – rather than actually first trying to understand what it is a customer is asking, or why are they asking this question. I heard this line during my support rotation and it really struck me: You can put a bandaid on the problem – or you can try address the cause now.

    Customers come with an expectation of what they think your product can do – and often will actually buy or use the product still fully expectant that it will do what they wanted it to do – even if it can’t.

    I had a support query where a customer had a very valid idea for a website he was trying to create – but the catch was that although it was a really good idea – the way he wanted to use some of our products was just not relevant to 99% of our customers. Maintaining your products focus amongst a sea of good ideas is key, you need stay focused on your product goals and keep working towards them.