The Flavor of Your Product

If I asked you to recall the first time you were tasting food you didn’t like — I mean really didn’t like and were even disgusted by — would you be able to? I guess you would, and I guess that, while running the tapes in your head, you are feeling that awful taste in your mouth right now, maybe also its smell. Your face is probably crumpled right now, and you probably nod your head. Chances are, you remember where that experience took place — whether it was during a special occasion, a festive celebration, or a standard day you were at home, the people you were with at that time or maybe you were on your own; you might remember what you wore or any other specific details related to that experience.

One key element that strongly contributes to memory creation and establishment is sensory experience. Sensory experience means information being taken in by our sensory receptors and processed in the nervous system. It’s something we feel with our physical senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste. Seeing a beautiful piece of art and listening to an exciting speech will give you a sensory experience and so will falling off your bike or coming home to smell something that tells you that you forgot to take out the garbage, once again.

Experiences involved or triggered by our senses create memory, which enables us to retain impressions of sensory information long after the original stimulus has gone.

When interacting with any application, website, service or device, we are taking in an enormous amount of visual information. This information is then processed by our nervous system, a process that involves several phases. At first, we notice the aesthetic nature of the interface, to which we usually refer as “the look and feel.” They say don’t look upon the vessel; however, upon the vessel we do look — as this is the first information we process when encountering something (or somebody) new. After falling in love with the look and feel or determining ‘not my type’, then we move forwards and look upon the vessel’s content. This happens while we get to work completing our mission or task that brought us to use the website or application to begin with. This is a deeper cognitive process in action, detecting and activating (preferably a minimal number of) required functional elements, selecting optimal selections, avoiding colossal errors, and getting things done as smoothly and quickly as possible. How excited we are just by seeing one of these “completed successfully” toasts. Cheers!

Entrepreneurs, product managers, UX experts, product designers, developers — no matter what role we play in the product’s life cycle — we wish the sensory impression our users take upon using our products would be of great delight. This is especially true when dealing with first time usage, because as I just described, a first sensory experience firmly establishes a strong memory. Memories attached to our products are hard to overcome, similarly to fixing a bad first impression. If we want to on-board people, we better nail it in the first place, as there is very little room for mistakes.

“Think on the end before you begin,” they say. In order not to release products that leave a bad taste in our users’ mouth, we better consider every aspect of the experience. One of the best ways to do so is prototyping: illustrating and demonstrating every aspect and element of the experience — starting from concepts, layouts, content, and UI elements, across all contact points, all the way to interactions, transitions, microcopy, and extreme cases. In my article, Be Your Design’s First User, I wrote about the importance of illustrating the design and walking through entire use cases to detect potentially missing pieces in the design, unclear or broken workflows, required alternative selections, failure scenarios, missing feedback mechanisms, and other things that leave a bad taste in users’ mouths. Tasting the dish — I mean the design — first is a must. Then, and as long as we can, we run usability tests with real customers prior to developing the product.

Flavor impression is generated by different stimulus types: taste, aroma, texture, and some would add expectation. At first, we recognize the basic taste from our tongue (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), and then the nasal nerves in our nose join the party, along with the cognitive process of texture — all to enable us to sense a versatile palette of flavors. Connoisseurs dedicatedly develop their skills to be able to sense fine elements of taste, smell, and texture. Gourmet requires fine-tuning of every little detail. Similarly, those who design the UX should develop their skills, refine their senses, and become more mindful of the extra range of flavors their design has to offer.

Bear in mind, there is only one chance to make a good first impression, as people quickly form an impression from what they see. Trust — which is a top-most critical element in services, products and applications — is mainly built on first impression. Most of these impressions are difficult to undo or reverse. Similarly, the memory of a lousy user experience cannot be easily fixed. There is only one way to know how your product tastes: You have to sample it.

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