One of the things I find fascinating as a Product Manager is what users find to be “valuable” to them, and what they describe as a product they would look forward to using every day.

In his book, Emotional Design, Donald Norman outlines how humans interact with everyday things, and how different aspects of the human subconscious, learned behavior, and cognitive thought impact our personal impressions of everyday objects, from juicers to ATM machines.

Even though the majority of a Product Manager’s job is to identify what will sell in the marketplace and what won’t, it’s important to understand how customers make judgments about the products they consume, and what drives them towards or away from specific products.

As the cost of developing internet-based software decreases through more efficient and capable development platforms (such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Linux and MySQL), the key differentiator between web applications will continue to be user interaction and visual design.

Applications which fail to recognize these aspects as critical central themes are most certainly doomed to failure.

Filed under: Product Management