Empowering the User
Understanding the middle ground between product value and user experience.
There are many paths to a Product Manager role. Mine wound its way through a series of happenstantial project management and software adjacent positions and, through persistent inquisitiveness and a fair bit of osmosis, here I am trying to backfill areas of understanding that my path didn’t formally address.
Another common path to product is through the world of UI, UX, and design, and is, in my opinion, significantly more useful in equipping a PM for targeting user empowerment. But what does user empowerment actually mean? A medium.com article on the subject defined it as such:
“User empowerment refers to the process of giving users the tools, knowledge, and control to make informed decisions, customize their experiences, and accomplish their goals effectively.”
To me, this feels like a set of value-add features cleverly tied together through world-class user experience. Great UX does little for growth and retention without the value-add features, but the most valuable features in the world are hugely stunted without great user experience. There is a sort of multiplier effect when you effectively pair the two and this, to me, is user empowerment.
Ok, so we know what user empowerment is, but what does it look like?
Ease of Use – Simple design and well-thought-out user flows are a big part. Complex screens can overstimulate the user or obscure the intuition of logical action paths. Less is more.
Intuitive Navigation – Minimizing the steps or actions necessary to achieve a value-add objective shortens time to value and mitigates user drop-off. Travel is an excellent analogy as nobody would willingly choose a flight with three layovers when they can get there direct, all else equal. Create your hub and build logical flows from there.
Information Density – Humans have a limited bandwidth for information consumption. Too much information on one screen can overwhelm or obscure while too little can mute the value or cause impatient users to drop before value is delivered.
Minimize Distractions – Metrics are critical to understanding user engagement and should be used extensively to guide product-level decisions. Features or product subsets with poor engagement rates should be investigated. If the investigation shows that the feature isn't valuable to the user, get rid of it! Distracting your customer with low-value features dilutes their experience, diminishes your product, and is the exact opposite of user empowerment.
This is not a complete list but should provide a high-level view of the concept. I want to note that user empowerment is not limited to just the app or website but include Customer Support, Success, onboarding, and foundational reliability functions as well. These functions are either outside of the product itself or so far behind the scenes that most folks without industry experience don’t know they exist, but are key drivers of user empowerment, nonetheless. I will, however, save the detailed breakdown of these areas for later posts as they each deserve their own time in the spotlight.
User Empowerment takes a team and continuous improvement to remain on target. It’s very much an art over a science so, if you are like me and not very art inclined, find yourself a world-class UI/UX/Design individual or team and empower them to help empower your users.