The Best Digital Product Is the One People Buy

3Pillar Global is a Business Reporter client.

This is the decade of the digital product. Right now, more than 11,000 software companies around the world employ over 20 million software developers, and are bringing in revenues of more than $100 billion.

How can software and technology companies drive growth in this competitive market? By prioritizing customer-focused product design. The best products aren’t the ones with the most features or the most advanced technology; they’re the products that people are adopting and using over and over again. Thus, the best way to get potential customers to use a digital product is to design for what they really need and want—and make it easy to use.

Too many companies build technology for technology’s own sake, without a real understanding of a product’s purpose or value. However, considering the actual end-user experience—why the customer is using the product in the first place—and designing that into the development process ensures a more successful product. Instead of approaching product design as a closed-end task, companies should integrate the expertise of designers, engineers, marketers and UX professionals in collaboration with each other throughout the entire development process.

Cybersecurity is one area ripe for this kind of change in 2021. The cybersecurity market is expected to grow by 10% in the next seven years to $326 billion. What is concerning is that most cybersecurity companies are still advertising what their products can do, instead of how their products can be used and the outcomes they will provide. “Cyber-confusion” remains a major problem in the industry, as products delivering increasingly advanced security solutions are increasingly difficult to use.

Customers expect the same easy-to-use experience from any software product as they do from their iPhones—including their cybersecurity products. One of the reasons for the iPhone’s continued success is its customer-centric design.

Why are technology products becoming more and more complicated to use when they should in fact be simpler? As companies compete to create secure connections for the new remote workforce, user-friendly product design is more important than ever.

In an economy fueled by software and data, companies should be thinking differently about how they build their digital products. To learn more about customer-centric product design, download your complimentary copy of Amazon bestseller The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks.


— Kim Mirazimi, Vice President, Technology, 3Pillar Global
_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credits: iStock 1201636338}