No matter what sector you are designing for, chances are it’s a super crowded, competitive landscape, with new products coming out everyday.
And the project management space is no exception.
Everyone of our competitors is solving a similar problem.
So it’s no longer enough to provide the utility that your competitors offer too, just in a much nicer designed interface.
That is not going to give you a stable platform to compete on.
You need to delight your users
Designing for delight is something we try and do at Streamtime everyday, in many ways.
Our goal is to create an emotional connection to our users. Remember, humans not robots.
How do we do that?
Well it’s about being thoughtful. Making our users feel as if we understand them better than they understand themselves.
Making sure we meet their needs, making sure we involve them in our user research so they feel like they are on a journey with us to create a better product.
And then it’s also about going that extra mile … about going beyond our customer’s expectations
For instance, in the product we program what we call moments of delight. Tiny little easter eggs, that are triggered or discovered in the product.
The result is that users love them when they receive them.
When D&AD results came out this year, NB Studio in London had a handful of pencils. One of their designers Sam also did a talk at the festival.
So we sent him a little message of congratulations, in the app.
I mean come on, this guy has come to work on the morning after D&AD awards and his project management software is congratulating him! That isn’t something that he’s expecting to happen.
But rightly so – D&AD awards are the pinnacle of the creative industry.
Hopefully Sam came away thinking, “Wow, Streamtime really get me. They are on my side.”
In that moment we’ve moved from a utility that Sam has to use in his day, to a service that is there to support him in his day to day.
This all drives advocacy. We see people sharing these moments of delight on social. People start recommending us to their friends.
And we can also use these moments of delight to prompt and develop behavioural change. Like rewarding you for getting things done.
We then take this principle and apply it to other parts of the product.
First time user? We’ve got a unique and delightful way of onboarding you.
Want to know what you can do on a screen? We’ve got a drone for that.
Thinking beyond just digital
This sentiment of delighting our users runs through everything else we do, from the digital and into the physical.
So it means our customer success team goes above and beyond just answering how-to questions—they help our customers build their business effectively, with Streamtime as a key tool.
Our customers get amazing swag when they sign up, or as a thank you for being involved in user research.
So by encouraging and supporting our users it leads to happier people.
And that starts to help us form a community of people who use our products and become invested in it.
What’s more it helps us move from being seen as dull, boring project management software to something that people actually enjoy using, which as we’ve talked about, brings a change for the better to the business and the culture.
No spreadsheet can do that.
Keen to learn more?
We’re sharing our Product Design Playbook. 10 rules we follow when we design. Head here to read other posts from the series.
