5-Bit Fridays: UX blunders, the cardinal sin, the ROI of beauty, and managing up

Also, one idea on how to create a very unique customer testimonials page

Jaryd here! You’re reading 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly ~5-minute morning roundup of 5 actionable insights that can help you build and grow your product. You can read my main How They Grow deep dives here, or my Why They Died failure breakdowns here.

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Happy Friday, everyone! ☕

ICYMI, I posted the first free version of From The Garden on Wednesday. FTG is the corner of this newsletter where I share one useful idea with you. This week, we covered how to find the invisible obstacles in your users' lives that demotivate them from buying.

Most of us think the best way to win people over is to push harder.

That is all very local thinking though. Because another type of friction exists outside of our product, inside your users’ everyday lives, and in their off-platform workflows.

These are the obstacles we don’t see: The hidden frictions

— Read: The New Couch Problem

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5 actionable insights from this week

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(I) Bad UX: 3 Mistakes

It’s easier than you think to make blunders in your UX with seemingly tiny things. I was reading an essay that spoke about 20 common ones, but here are three that really bother me personally. 😓

• Long dropdowns. If there’s a lot of scrolling happening in your dropdown, you’re doing something wrong. This is especially the case on mobile. You may need to break things up, cut your list down, or rethink the form structure.

• Overkill on the tooltips. If you’ve sprinkled little tooltip icons everywhere to explain how things work, you’re not addressing the real problem of onboarding users to your product. When overdone, it’s a sign of laziness as you’re pushing the burden on the user to read all your little microscopy. This is equally true with banners.

• Complex password requirements. There’s really just no need to make it hard for people to figure out a password for your app. I mean, how annoying is it when you keep getting told you’re missing some character from the Chinese alphabet and a Roman numeral?!

There are 17 more great ones in there. Follow the link below if you’re interested. Also, I’d love to hear if you have any pet peeve UX mistakes. Drop a comment!

Your call to action: 🏃 When you're making choices about how some feature will look and feel-- including the small little UX patterns around it--always ask yourself if you like those things. Do you like needing to give complex passwords? If not, it's a good sign you probably should push that to your users.

[Go deeper: Bad Bad UX: 20 Common Mistakes in User Experience, by FlowMapp]

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(II) The most important way to manage up

Unless you’re a founder, your relationship with your manager is the most important one to get right. And the most reliable way to get it right is to remove uncertainty for them and build ridiculous levels of trust. Just one rudimentary example: If your manager asks, “What's the status?” then it's already too late. There’s uncertainty.

You need to make sure they know you’re always moving something forward and there’s no need for them to check in, ever. You do that by:

1. Saying what you’ll do

2. Doing it well and updating them regularly

3. Telling them when it’s done and how it went

One template that works well for me is the PPP model. It’s light, quick, and clear.

Your call to action: 🏃 Overcommunicate things, and don’t underestimate how explict you can and should be.

[Go deeper: Managing Up: 3 things I wish I realized sooner, by

Jordan Cutler

]

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(III) 3 Questions to ask yourself as a leader

If you are a manager, one of the most important soft skills is self-awareness. As Akash Mukherjee says, “I’ve made many mistakes by not paying attention to how others might see my actions. A leader’s actions have a deep impact on individuals. You should choose them carefully.”

He suggests 3 things we can ask ourselves to be more self-aware.

• Would you want to work for yourself?

• Are you evaluating your actions periodically?

• Do you balance your core leadership strengths? For example, if you’re very candid with people in feedback, are you balancing that with positive affirmations and great support?

Your call to action: 🏃 Next week, pay extra mind to your non-verbal cues. Check in on your own emotions, and ask yourself during interactions if perhaps they're bleeding into your communication. Say you're rushing to get something done and are under pressure, ask yourself, “Am I being a little too direct or short with people today?"

[Go deeper: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself As A Leader, by

Akash Mukherjee

]

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(IV) Inbox ten - don’t commit the cardinal sin

The two bits above make this obvious point even more so: communication matters. Meta CTO, Boz, puts it perfectly:

Your ability to be effective is a function of your ability to efficiently ingest the information around you. Without this you have no chance of synthesizing something valuable. And this is why you end up plugged into vast communication networks of email, messages, slacks, chats, posts, video calls, all-hands, meetings, and any number of other channels.

In information work the cardinal sin is to block another team. You are one person and they may be many which means every second wasted risks being multiplied. We should all aspire to develop reputations of increasing leverage.

So, how do you stay updated on all the necessary info so you can advance your own work (inbound coms), while also keeping others updated so they can do the same (outbound coms)? Boz has a bunch of brilliant tactics (well worth the read, you can just skip to #3), but here’s the headline: Never end the day with more than 10 unreads in any inbox; systemize deleting emails; and decline to engage if you don’t have anything to add or have time to take on more.

Your call to action: 🏃 Think of your information ecosystem like a garden. You just need to do a little bit each day to maintain it, but if you neglect it, you'll quickly have it overrun.

[Go deeper: Inbox Ten, by Boz]

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(VI) Craft and beauty: The ROI of marrying form and function

Craft and beauty inside products often get dismissed as just aesthetics, but now, when we’re overloaded with product choices, gorgeous UI/UX are what people will choose. As Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe, tells us:

“[In a crossed market] the quality and details become the differentiation. We’re eager to prioritize craft and beauty not simply because we think the world is better when it’s more beautiful, but also because quality is important for growth”

When something feels like a work of art—something a product team has really poured attention to detail into—people gravitate towards it and it drives usability and engagement. Cosmetics are a growth lever.

Just remember: We like beautiful things for rational reasons.

Your call to action: 🏃 The only way you'll ship a high-craft product is if craft becomes a culture thing. Everyone needs to decide to care more about what goes out to users. It's about not accepting 7/10 choices and holding the product to a higher bar.

[Go deeper: Craft and beauty: The ROI of marrying form and function, by Figma]

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1 tactical idea worth thinking about

Think about building a more unique, interactive, and context-rich customer testimonial / social proof page. So many companies all have the same generic “Case Studies” page, so, this is an opportunity nobody is really differentiating on.

Btw, this is by far the coolest one I’ve seen in a long time (scroll down once). I love it because it shows screenshots of real WhatsApp conversations! It’s a similar concept to

Tom Orbach

’s of “Screenshot marketing = the ultimate curiosity hook”

Check it out, take inspiration!

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1 How They Grow lesson

I absolutely loved writing this deep dive on Roku, and thought I’d reshare it since it went live exactly a year ago! We’re now 3X bigger, so I imagine a few folks may have missed it!

To understand the power dynamics between different platforms, aggregators, and other players in a tech ecosystem, it’s helpful to look at them as a vertical stack with different layers.

At each layer, companies are trying to create value for customers and capture value for their bottom lines. The lower in the stack you go, generally, the more valuable the layer will be. Why?

Because whoever controls a layer has huge bargaining power and leverage, allowing them to call the shots for how value creation and value capturing are happening in the layers above them. For example, big-box retailers like Walmart control the retail distribution layer, allowing them to dictate the terms—ultimately deciding who lives and dies in the consumer goods world. Amazon does that online.

Subsequently, we often see:

• Companies adding layers on top of their existing business (thus, giving them platform power)

• Companies moving down the stack to get closer to the base/bottom layer

The base layer, simply, is the last UI in the stack that we as end-users deal with. In tech, this is usually an operating system connected to hardware

From…

How Roku Grows: The Platform For Streaming Platforms

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Enjoy the weekend everyone!
I’ll see you on Wednesday.

—Jaryd

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