The Best Products Feel Familiar
Many companies and product teams today are derided for idea theft. It’s not uncommon to hear people say “oh Instagram just stole the concept for Stories from Snapchat” or “that company is just another Uber for X”.
There are a lot of business reasons behind why completely copying a company is a bad idea. Sure, great artists steal, but it’s difficult to ’steal’ the marketplace effects of Uber, or have the ability to drive eyeballs in the way that Instagram has been able to do with Stories. But there’s an interesting lesson to be learned sometimes from building products that may feel borrowed, or in more preferred terms- familiar.
It’s incredibly hard to get people to use new products. Year over year reports show (https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/12/the-mobile-app-gold-rush-may-be-over/) that consumers are downloading fewer apps from the Apple App Store, and anyone trying to sell or fundraise for a startup product knows the trials and tribulations of convincing people why they need a new thing, your thing.
It’s for this reason that product managers and founders should always aim to build products that feel familiar. The value you create is unique for your audience. Maybe your product is faster than other products, or better, or cheaper. But when convincing people to try new things, you already have an uphill battle, so make it easy on yourself and develop experiences that people have a relative knowledge about out of the gate.
Example- at Doximity we build professional networking tools for clinicians. It’s common to hear that people describe us as “LinkedIn or Facebook for doctors”. When we build our products, it’s not uncommon to have features that are similar in nature to those of LinkedIn or Facebook. We allow doctors to discover news and join conversations via a Newsfeed similar to Facebook. We have tools for finding jobs at hospitals that are similar to tools offered by LinkedIn.
Our tools behave in a way that many of our users have come to expect from comparable services- you can scroll our Newsfeed in the way you scroll through Facebook. You can add colleagues in a similar manner to adding friends. We have a Like button for content. While our company provides an incredible amount of specific value for our audience that none of the aforementioned companies provide, we do share similar traits in our User Experience (UX). These traits allow a user to seamlessly transition between these various sites, feeling educated and still understanding how everything works, without having to learn completely different rules and behaviors with our tool. Doctors know how to like and comment on content on our site because they do that in their personal lives on Facebook. We don’t have a desire to disrupt the Like button- we just want to curate and share content on our site that provides value to our audience on a daily basis.
So build products that are familiar- you don’t have to innovate on every button or user journey. You shouldn’t. That will confuse your users and make for a poor initial experience, and maybe even turn them off to the core value you hopefully offer.
