The Popsa team came up with some beautiful concept designs earlier in the year.
Importantly, we also set out to deliver this in an automated way, removing as many manual steps as possible in order to liberate our customers to immerse themselves in their photos and in rekindling their shared experiences after a turbulent year. After all, making the design process accessible to people from all walks of life is central to Popsa’s mission.
Peak Efficiency
We had our challenge, but time was incredibly tight. There’s not much point in launching a calendar product in March when no one is interested; we had to finish everything by our ‘peak period’ in mid-November - just in time for customers to order them as Christmas gifts. We had given ourselves 13 weeks.
There are three critical things that I learnt during my 10 years as a Product Owner when it comes to maximising value in a short space of time:
Firstly, when embarking on a new product, don’t look at what your competitors are doing. This is particularly dangerous when your USP is user experience.
It can be so tempting to take a shortcut to save time - to inherit someone else’s learning - but more often than not you end up importing their mistakes instead. Wherever possible, start from first principles and what you know about your own customers.
We did not study any established examples of user experiences for designing calendars. Instead we looked at what had made our Photobook creation experience so popular – how our customers were describing it relative to other products in the market in their own words.
We concluded that we had to build a UX that took away “faff” and “frustration”. People weren’t looking for the cheapest, nor something with the most features, they wanted a creation process that did not get in the way of the emotional connection they felt towards their photos and the people in them.
We needed to show our customers value as soon as possible, do most of the heavy-lifting, but then ensure that they could transform their creation in any direction within two taps.
We wanted to give our customers real control of their creation by allowing them to mould and adapt without cognitive overhead.
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Secondly, design with passive provision in mind.
When civil engineers are designing tunnels, such as those for Crossrail or HS2, they’ll occasionally plan tunnel ‘stubs’ that will allow for easy future expansion without having to suspend service on the main part of the new line. Without these pre-planned branching off points - passive provision - it is often too difficult or prohibitively expensive to come back later and add something to the network.
This problem can also occur when building digital products at scale. Too often an API, data model or user interface is designed with only the short term objective in mind which means it’s really hard to branch off when building new functionality in the future, without causing some kind of backwards compatibility problem or triggering a large-scale redesign.
Judging how much time (and thus money) to put into something that might not ever happen is as much an art as it is a science but you can achieve an awful lot by thinking in abstract terms and facing up to any complexity early on as thought experiments, rather than leaving it to chance.
We did exactly this with Photobooks in 2019 and the pay off was our rapid development of Calendars in 2020.
For the first 3 years of Popsa’s life we had resisted introducing the ability to add captions under your photos – in fact any text at all – until we had the time to focus on it.
Having no captions might seem insane, but we had huge year-on-year growth for 3 consecutive years without any ability for users to add any kind of text. Better to have a simple product that works seamlessly than a fully featured product that’s a nightmare to use.
We could have added some sort of primitive text ability at any point but the problem with moving fast and breaking things is that you’re often left maintaining lots of disparate areas of functionality that are incompatible with each other.
Our restraint meant that when we came to add this feature to our range of photobooks we were able to come up with an incredibly flexible system that adapts to many scenarios.
Text might seem like a trivial thing but it’s actually one of the trickiest areas of design engineering because every operating system renders text differently. This is a problem if you are designing on one platform and re-creating that design as a print-file on another one, like we do at Popsa.
Before even thinking about how a user might add a caption to their photobook, we spent September 2019 going back to the fundamentals of typography and prototyping the representation of attributes such as letter-spacing, line-height, rotation, and alignment across 3 different platforms and painstakingly adjusted each of them until they matched.