Secret behind succesful design

Why Understanding Customer Emotions is the Secret Sauce Behind Successful Product Design

By Nikhil Prabhakar, CIO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Understanding your customer is the foundation of every business, but truly understanding how they feel makes all the difference. The ability to use the right language, ask the right questions, and decode expressions into technical requirements to understand what the user wants, how they want it, makes the difference between a product that’s tolerated and one that’s loved. An HBR research states that products that successfully connect with customers’ emotions see up to 70% increases in the usage. 

It just indicates one simple insight – successful products are forged in the fires of human emotions. The stronger the understanding of the user’s empathy heatmap, the more successful the product. 

Emotional decoding: Shifting to signal from noise 

Spanning over different languages (22 official languages, 121 scheduled languages, and more than 19500 dialects), geographies (Tier 1 to Tier 3), age groups (Gen Z entrepreneurs to seasoned traders), and turnovers (micro to mid-sized), we are a hugely diverse economy, making it essential that our products also cater to equally diverse MSMEs. 

For such a diverse set of audiences, our understanding can be limited and often influenced by our own contextual biases, knowledge, and experiences. Thus, the key is active yet selective listening. Actively listening to what your users want, but cautiously accepting that not every request is a feature. 

Sometimes, there is a vast chasm between what they say and what they need. Emotions that depict “it’s very frustrating” could reflect higher load time, too many steps before checkout, unpleasant UI or anything else. As the product owner, it is your selective listening that helps you decode these emotions into tactical product features and build a product that is intuitive enough for the least tech-savvy user and powerful enough for the most demanding power user, while fulfilling the core need. 

The Design Stage: Painkillers First, Vitamins Later

Once the feedback is in and the user’s emotional journey has been mapped, the next step is prioritization. What a user needs first is a painkiller, basically, features that address immediate needs that hinder a business. Vitamins, potentially beneficial, can come at a later stage. 

During the process of redesigning the IndiaMART buyer dashboard, there was an option to add dozens of analytical tools, personalization options, and discovery features. Instead, the focus ruthlessly remained on the core painkillers: making it easier to post requirements, faster to connect with relevant suppliers, and simpler to track conversations. 

Reaching the 75% 

A successful product in its launch stage is usually a 75% developed product, usually validated via a couple of litmus tests. 

• Solution to core functional problem: Is your product solving the fundamental problem that your customer hired you to solve, once the UI and fancy design are stripped away? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, in its notes, states that every year 30,000 new consumer products are launched and 95% of them fail, primarily because they fail to address the ‘job’. At IndiaMART, a buyer comes to find relevant suppliers and get quotes. Everything else is secondary to that core problem. 

• Simplicity of the product: Today, 95% of purchase decisions are driven by emotions, and frustration is the fastest way to lose a user. PWC reports that 32% of customers walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. Simplicity of the product can be defined by how fast and easily a user progresses from the first step of the app to the final step. If your product needs a manual and ten different Google searches or ChatGPT prompts to understand, you have already lost.  

• ROI justification: Emotional satisfaction must also translate to business outcomes. For B2B, sellers getting qualified leads should be renewing subscriptions easily. If not, we’ve not addressed the core problem. 

The iteration – journey from 75% to 90% 

Launch is never the final destination. The harder part is reaching from a decently good product to genuinely great, via a systematic iteration. The iterative process helps in connecting with the users better, analyzing whether their pre-launch expectations have been met, and if not, understanding the existing painpoints. 

Every step in the iteration process makes the product 1% better and closer to the user. Some of the ways to test how the product is doing include: 

• • Usage metrics: High usage of a product post launch, user drop out at a certain touchpoint, frequent usage of certain features, or no usage at all indicate that the product is connecting with the users. In addition to this, verbal or written feedback (comments on app store/play store), social media engagement (positive/negative), also helps in understanding the customer emotions while using the product and the touchpoints which need improvement. 
  • Controlled experimentation: Usage patterns, technical glitches, load time, multiple redirections, and frictionless/complicated navigation within the solution lead to customer frustration, dropouts or displeasure towards the product. These technical issues often appear during A/B testing, and help in ensuring user delight if solved timely. Rigorous A/B testing can help with a 15-25% higher conversion rate for a product. 

• Ability to monetize: In the iteration cycle, monetisation potential is a later step, but a significant one in the whole journey. Users may tolerate a free product that takes a long time to load, yet gets the work done. But they will only pay for a product that delivers real value. Thus, generating positive human emotions towards your product becomes a significant way to analyze the success of the product.  

Emotion in the age of AI: The road ahead: 

Emotionally engaged customers are 3x more likely to recommend a product, highlighting that customer emotions are ultimately the North Star. When a product manager prioritizes customer pains and iterates relentlessly, the outcome not only connects with the users but also retains and scales. Thus, the future doesn’t lie in choosing between a data-driven approach and human intelligence, but in combining them and building a product that matters.