9 Product Development Areas You Can’t Afford to Ignore

We present the critical focus areas that may not always steal the spotlight but play a vital role in the success of your digital product.

When developing a new digital product, there are several crucial areas that often don’t receive enough attention but can significantly impact the project’s success. 

Why don’t they get the attention they deserve? Because many people outside the industry pigeonhole these aspects of product development as “mechanical stuff” that lives under the hood of the project. 

In other words, they are not the color, upholstery, or infotainment system of the car. But they are the very things that make that car hum. And if not addressed, they are the component parts that may leave you and your customers stranded on the side of the digital road calling for help. 

This piece outlines some of the most important places to invest when devising your digital growth plans and why we think they can be so critical to your business’ success.

We’ve spilled a lot of digital ink about this over the years, but we cannot overstate the importance of understanding your target audience. 

Oftentimes, clients are under the impression they know their customer well enough to skip past user research. They’ve managed their products and seen the analytics for years, and “they know what they’re selling” better than an outsider. 

These all may be true, but what business leaders don’t always have is insight into how customers will react to new digital products or changes to a current one. Through our experience, we know the only way to know these answers is through research and testing. 

The good news is that this phase can be tailored to a client’s budget and done fairly quickly (perhaps adding just a month to the timeline). In the big picture, that’s a small price to pay for the confidence you’re building the right product and that it will perform as expected. 

It’s important to ensure your digital product is accessible to all users including those with disabilities. Not only is it a matter of compliance with current legal standards, but more critically, it is the right thing to do for customers and your business. 

Recognizing that even the smallest market segment comes in many shapes and sizes is good common sense. If done right, it will increase goodwill for your brand and expand your base of potential clientele.

In addition, the innovations in accessibility often end up helping a broader audience: better screen contrast helps anyone in suboptimal lighting situations, transcripts and captions on audio and video add a helpful dimension for searching, scanning, or consuming content in noisy (or the exact opposite: very quiet) environments, and voice commands can be a superior means of directing an experience – when cooking or driving, for example. 

Related to both #1 and #2, it’s important to invest time in ensuring site or app navigation is clear and easy-to-use. Hero images, animations, and beautiful page layouts get lots of attention, but great navigation is key to improving user satisfaction and retention.

There is nothing worse than getting to the place you want to be and then not being able to find what you are looking for. Likewise, being led in the wrong direction because the navigation is too complicated, clever, or presented in a manner that doesn’t speak to actual user needs can be equally frustrating. 

Poor navigation is a fast track to proving how little you understand your customer – how they think, the words they use, and how they prefer to interact. You are not out to win awards, you are out to optimize your business for your customer. The best navigations out there are the ones that work.

Do your best not to frame your digital initiatives as a short-term fix. In the HBR article The Two Big Reasons Digital Transformations Fail, the authors suggest that one of the primary reasons for failure is “unsuccessful efforts to scale digital innovations beyond early pilot work.” This can happen for a number of reasons, including organizational structure, budget, or technical limitations. 

Through our Purpose-Driven Design process, we work with clients to conceive and engineer their systems to evolve and grow. Even if you are not able to invest in a long-term plan initially, it is best to put the building blocks in place from the start. 

Plan for future growth by designing a scalable architecture. This includes the right design system and codebase, efficient database management, and flexible server infrastructure. Planning the resources and budget for continual support, optimization, and growth also matters – and we can help in those instances as well with retainers or team augmentation plans.

With every new device and cellular grid innovation, expectations for speed increase. Pay close attention to your product’s speed. Use efficient coding practices, optimize images and media, maximize server performance, and leverage caching to reduce loading times, because fast performance is critical for user retention. 

Through his research, The Time to Win author Jay Baer found that two-thirds of customers say speed is as important as price, and 50% of customers are less likely to spend money with a business that takes longer to respond than they expect. 

Just as you wouldn’t want a customer seeking help from customer service to wait too long for support, you don’t want your digital experience to be slow and frustrating.

When your favorite feature takes too long to load, no one will know why it was your favorite in the first place.    

Any data breach is a big deal. If it’s bad enough, it can run a small company into the ground or shave billions off a large company’s market capitalization. Implement robust security measures to protect user data from the start, including encryption, routine updates and patching, secure authentication methods, and regular security audits and penetration testing. 

Treat your customers (and their information) as you would want your own information treated. It will be an investment you won’t regret. And if doing the right thing isn’t impetus enough, there are significant fines under a variety of regulatory bodies for not implementing proper security measures into your digital assets.

Invest in high-quality, relevant content that adds value to your users. 

Depending on the type of business you operate, this can take different forms. For an automaker, it might be 360 videos that take you inside the car and let you rotate the exterior at different angles. For a manufacturer of complex machinery, it might be how-to videos. For a domestic appliances company, it might be unique recipes. 

It could be as simple as a great FAQ page or homepage copy. Whatever it is, create your content for a reason, and make sure your end users immediately grasp why it matters. 

If your content can’t be evergreen, it’s important to develop a long-term content strategy that includes regular updates and diverse content types matched to the channels where it will be distributed. Be sure to stick to your strategy and create valuable content that fulfills the promise you make to your users when you offer it—that your content is worth their time.

It’s hard to know if you’re succeeding if you can’t see your results. It seems obvious, but analytics can be treated as an afterthought in the midst of a big, exciting redesign. 

At a minimum, you’ll want to use tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior, engagement, and conversion rates. This data is crucial for making informed decisions.

With a deeper engagement, time can be spent carefully outlining project KPIs and mapping them to business goals, and then setting up the systems to track them. 

Predictive analytics, heat mapping, user surveys, and alerts or automated reports just scratch the surface of what’s possible. The metrics matter, but it’s critical to contextualize them and “know what good looks like.” Armed with this information, businesses can ensure their products are performing and delivering the results they are after.

Ensuring your new product has clear and comprehensive policies and practices that comply with local and international regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) is vital to building trust with your customers and avoiding regulatory issues and fines. 

It’s important to create detailed terms of service to protect your business and clearly inform users of their rights and responsibilities. More than ever, consumers are aware of how their personal data is being used and are wary of companies who don’t take it seriously. 

The social and health impacts of digital products are also in the spotlight more than ever before. Work with your internal teams and agency partners to evaluate and mitigate risk. And if your product has unique and protectable components, you’ll want to consider relevant IP protection to make sure they can be fully leveraged for your business.

Investing in these often-overlooked areas can significantly enhance the success and longevity of your digital product. Balancing initial excitement with practical and strategic investments will provide a strong foundation for growth and user satisfaction.

If you’re about to embark on a digital redesign, rebuild, or optimization project, please take these recommendations to heart. And should you want an experienced helping hand on your journey, you know we’re here to help. 

Karri Offstein Rosenthal is a digital strategist, writer, and podcast host-producer whose latest series, “Held,” was a Top 25 Apple documentary podcast. Her play, “Broken Water,” was presented as part of the Lab@Piven and The Oil Lamp Theater Play Reading Series in the Chicago area. She was Director of Online Selling for the Scholastic Education Group and a marketer for startups and established firms in the education and beauty industries.