Product experience — small details matter

Vineet Taneja
2 min readFeb 21, 2022

A big brokerage company’s iOS app recently introduced a feature “slide to buy”. I noticed some friction in using this a few times, but this week when I used it within a few minutes of using a similar feature on a big ecommerce company’s iOS app “swipe to place your order”, the difference in implementation and the resulting user experience stood out in stark contrast.

The big brokerage company app’s slide button behaves like a reluctant widget which won’t get to the other end unless the user interacts with it in a very specific manner — hit it like a golf ball, do not slide it slowly to the end. The ecommerce app’s slide button is a breeze — it has no temperament issues, slides all the way to the end and even provides a status message on the bar making the user feel confident in their action and expected outcome.

Analyzing from a product perspective, few things come to mind:

Bug or feature: Sometimes it is the implementation in code that could lead to a sub-optimal user experience and other times the product may have been designed/spec’ed as such.

Development process: Could this have been caught by good testing and self-hosting?

Listening to users: Is this showing up as a problem in app store reviews or focus groups?

Keep it simple: Is a slide interaction necessary where a simple button-that-clicks would do?

Polish in a finished product is everyone’s responsibility in a product group — PMs, engineers, designers, researchers, data scientists and leaders.

Originally published on LinkedIn

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Vineet Taneja

Leader, mentor and writer — product management and careers