Do you remember a time when you went to dinner at that restaurant everyone was talking about? You probably booked the table days, if not weeks in advance and told friends how excited you were about going. When you arrived the staff were polite, you got a good table and the meal was well cooked. But all in all the experience didn’t blow you away and you left feeling a little disappointed. There was nothing inherently wrong with the product—it just hadn’t lived up to your expectations.

In business, we succeed when the experience of using our product or service matches our customer’s expectation of it. How the customer expects the product to work and how he expects to feel when he uses it, is more important than what the product does or doesn’t do (which is why Apple’s job gets harder and harder with every new product release).

We design better products and services by understanding what customers expect and how they want to experience them.

The first rule for making a better product is to think feelings before features.

Image by Santi MB