4 phases of Product Improvement. Repair. Refine. Improve. Differentiate…
By: Rameez Kakodker
Tags: Framework, User Experience, Improvement, Product Management, Product

Recently, I was in a conversation with my UX lead on how they implement a UX strategy in an already launched product. We were discussing how a product prioritization framework fails to tell a story of improvement — it helps you identify specific, immediate areas of improvement, but it does not help you put an arc of the phases of improvement. When we phase out improvement, we need to impose an arc which exposes specific areas of:

Repair Refinement Improvement Differentiation

Each phase alleviates the customers problems and helps increase conversions. The last phase increases the market share since it helps you create ‘hype’ around your product.

What follows is a discussion of what each of these ‘phases’ mean and how you can identify and implement areas of improvement.

Preparation

Before we go into the phases, we must first setup feedback or input routes : Stakeholders/customers/market research — all provide valuable inputs to prioritize the coming changes. Routes are essentially people or sources that you keep in constant touch to make sure you’re going the right way, like a mini-map on the screen. Keeping steady, consistent and rewarded input-routes ensures that you’re always delivering on the right things. Personally, I keep a few stakeholders and a few customer support members for regular checkups on customers pulse. Rewarding the inputs is also essential — they’re invested in you, only if you are invested in them.

Secondly, we must also ensure that the high-level plan proposed is understood by everyone — if you directly start repairing, you’ll end up being viewed as someone who lacks vision (more on that later).

Now, let’s look at the 4 steps to achieving the perfect product — for an already launched product.

Repair

Coming into an already launched product, you’ll immediately notice large glaring gaps in the user experience or customer journeys. Those are the ones you’d want to focus on first. Using the Pareto principle, you’ll find that the 20% of the problems cause 80% of the pain to the customer. Fixing those will get you the maximum bang for your buck. While this might seem like you’re fixing only the symptoms and not the root problems, sometimes alleviating the immediate pain leads to a better experience.

Consider a simple ecommerce website — https://ae.iherb.com/. A quick look at the website shows that the Information Architecture (IA) and the checkout need love — whole lotta love. The IA is confusing to a new user, while the checkout sits to push away customers:

Guest checkout is de-facto experience customers demand.

A UX research will show high-drop off rates at the first step of the checkout. Note that there is a business need to verify the account before proceeding with the checkout formalities — it makes logical sense for the business to optimize for ‘real orders’ — however, adding the verification later on, after commitment from the customer (by way of payment), will drastically improve the business & customer experience.

These 20% issues will have 80% impact on your top line.

Refine

Once you’re done with the repairs, the next step is to refine the existing features that you have — improving the user experience, product offering and matching the feature set with the competition brings you at par with the competition.

Look for features that your competition has and see how feasible it is to implement them in your product. Again, your target is to balance things out, get on par with the rest.

H&M (on the left) can benefit from a simple size drop down, shown on Namshi (on the right) that changes the size, based on the size locale selected

H&M website on the left can definitely benefit from having a simple size locale drop down (International/UK/US sizing), instead of tucking that away in the size guide.

Again, these refinements need not be only UX — simple things like offering next day delivery, adding gift wrapping etc are low hanging, easy to solve operational challenges that go a long way to refine your product offering.

Improve

By now, your product would be on a steady track — majority of the glaring experience issues would have been fixed, and the rollout of refinement features would be in progress. Taking the market/customer research, it’s time to work on making features that improve your product offering. These are features that differentiate your product from the rest of the competition.

Here are a couple of examples:

Checking store stock is a good way to improve traffic to the site.

The above feature in https://www.kiabi.ae drives an important psychological aspect to the visitors of the site. They connect with the site, not as a selling tool, but an information tool — knowing if that trip that you’re about to take to the store will get you the product you want, goes a long way to improve organic conversions. Even if a percentage of those users use this to eventually buy online, it’s an organic, not-bought-for conversion.

The second example is from Amazon Prime — the key thing here is what you get beyond just the prime delivery option — the plethora of content at your disposal will imprint on the customers mind the benefit of Amazon, making it easier for your customer to transact on the site.

Differentiate

By now, your product would be on a steady growth path of success. Now is the time to add the disruptive ideas — pivot certain experiences for creating PR value, adding those crazy ideas that sit at the bottom of the pool — to create exceptional value. These features drive the PR for your product, adding swag to the offering.

Here is an easy example:

Pizza huts innovative build-your-own-pizza table

In the world of digital commerce, the examples are aplenty. Here is another from Amazon: the (now discontinued) Dash button:

Tap the physical button to add items to your amazon cart; checkout when convenient.

These experiences are a pivot around the standard customer journey and bring in a lot more PR than it brings conversions, driving brand recognition, association and value.