Make Your Products Easier to Use

0:00I have another rant, but I think it's an important one, and that is that I think. People should just make their products easier to use. If you want to improve your product, make it easier to simply consume. And it sounds like, yeah, no duh. But I find myself in situations very often, where what seemingly seems to be something very simple, turns out to be this like absolute rigmarole, where I'm like, if you had just made your product easier, like the product is instantly better. You don't even have to change the product itself. You can just change how it's delivered, or how someone purchases it. I want to tell a story about an encounter that I had with a company for business,

1:06where I just found the process difficult, like so difficult that I'm like, man, if you guys just spent a little bit of time just improving the onboarding process, your product will be better without changing the actual deliverables. So I recently worked with a book printer, and we're still working with them. They're great, but it took multiple weeks to get this print job correct. And the reason that it took so long was because I, as the customer, was never given the proper tools from the get, like from the beginning, to create the book. And I didn't have the proper instructions on how to format the book. So this is not so, but that my previous printer is Lulu, and we still use them to print the hot, the pool book right now.

2:10That process was also labor intensive to get that book printed, but it was certainly easier because they're more of a tech company as opposed to just a printing company. So they have built like a tech interface to upload your book without needing help from a human being, right? The problem with that interface was when a problem occurred, it basically just gave you an error without telling you exactly what the error was and exactly how to fix it. And I think a lot of this, and the same was true with the other printer. The other printer, I said, okay, tell me what you need. And they're like, all right, we need everything to be pure black. We need everything to do this, blah, blah. And they're just telling me through email. And I'm like, okay, I am somebody who, I'm a graphic designer.

3:12I've done print work in my past. I very rarely do print work, and if I do, it's mostly been digital. So it has been a very long time since I've done actual ink printing work. So I know what DPI is, dots per inch. I know what CMYK is versus RGB. I understand some stuff, probably more than the average person. But this is not the world that I live in all the time. And honestly, I don't know if a lot of graphic designers live in the same world. I think, yes, I don't do graphic designers my full time job. But even if I did, printing is not a major part of that. Or at least it wouldn't be for me because I am a graphic designer for an internet company. So my point here is not that the final product is bad.

4:14In any way, I think the problem and the frustration came from the back and forth of, listen, I'm trying to work with you. I'm trying to help, I'm trying to pay you money, I'm trying to buy this product from you. I want this to be correct. Like, I'm going to see this all the way through. But I am getting increasingly frustrated with the communication process, not that they were being mean or anything, not that the customer service was necessarily bad. It was just that I was just shooting in the dark. I am trying to figure out their process and they're just spitting words at me. To the point, I swear to God I did this. And it was incredibly helpful. I, they were, again, everyone at the company is nice. Everyone was very patient with me. I am happy with the result. And I now understand what I need to do.

5:16Going forward to print more from them. So this is not a knock on their company or even Lulu. Right? I had the same issues with Lulu, but the hardest part with Lulu was that I couldn't talk to anybody. So the, however, however, Lulu did create multiple high quality videos. And they were fairly updated. That walked you through the entire process of formatting a book for their printing needs and for their system. And I just watched that video and followed it to a tee. And yes, I still ran into issues, but that was incredibly helpful. Right? And it got me through the process and it didn't take me weeks. It may have taken me a day or two. Still frustrating, but I was kind of on my own. And they did have a lot of resources for me to digest.

6:17Now, this other company had those resources. They weren't very good. I'll say that. They weren't videos. It was a PDF that they did not send to me. That was not a part of the process. And so I kept saying to them, do you have something to send me that like, I need to know what your rules are. Because I don't know this world. And they kept using phrases. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. I, like, I understand what CMYK is. Got it. I understand what DPI is. Understood. What I don't understand is what pure black means. Now I do now because they had, they had to tell me. And I had to look it up. So here's what I did. Because this didn't happen. It was all this, it was so much back and forth through email that I had to call the company and try not to get upset. Like I was just like, okay. Can you just explain it to me like a goddamn dog?

7:17Because I don't understand what you're saying. And then finally somebody said to me, did you get our PDF, our onboarding PDF? And I said, no, I've been asking for it. And they're like, oh, we have one. And I was like, well, that would have saved me a lot of time if I had known you had that. Now, it wasn't a PDF. It was just a link to a page on their website. And it was very thin. So here's what I did. I took all of their emails. I took this whole page that they had on their website. I stuck it into chat GPT. And I said, explain this to me like I have no idea how to do formatting. Like I've never used in design before. And it did it. And it explained everything in clear terms to me where I was like, okay, I understand.

8:21It gave me a step-by-step process that I was able to go through. Here's where it gets increasingly frustrating. I did that. I followed it to a T. I uploaded it to them because they had this uploading system. They get back to me and they said, everything's great. There was one issue but we took care of it on our end. And I go, what was the issue? Because I still, with the amount of back and forth, still, what I thought was a pitch perfect file structure, still had an error in it. I go, this must be impossible. This must be impossible, right? It can't just be me. This must be something they deal with constantly. And it just brought me to this idea that if you just made the process easier, you would be able to have happier customers.

9:23There may be a lot of customers, and I don't know this, I'm speculating, but there may be a lot of customers who are like, you know, they print great stuff. But man, was it a tough, it was a bear to work with them in the beginning. And maybe a lot of people in that process sort of give up and go, or they end up just hiring somebody to do it for them and paying even more money because they're like, this is just impossible. Which is probably honestly something I should have done anyway. I should have been like, you deal with it. You know, take my book, I'll pay whatever amount of money you just deal with it. But that was an offer to me. And so, again, no ill will toward this company whatsoever. But it just got me thinking about making products easier to use. And I started to think about my own products and go, okay, let's forget about changing the product itself.

10:23You know, like, let's just take our book. Our book, we designed that book to be incredibly user friendly. The language in the book is easy to understand. The fonts are bigger than normal books because we know that our audience is in an, are elderly, right? Because only older people really own swimming pools or take care of them. And that's just from demographic research that we've had for, you know, 20 years or so. So like, we knew, okay, we're making this book easy to use. The graphics were clear. The charts were legible. We also added metric and imperial measurements because, again, all of this was an effort to make the book easy to use. The color coding of the chapters to make it easy to find, you know, quick references, things like that. But I'm like, okay, we've done the work to make the book itself easy. When you look at every other pool book on the planet,

11:27none of them have thought about any of this. And I don't blame them. Why would they? They're making a book. But we just are constantly thinking about how to make this product easier to use. So then we go, okay, how do we make it easy to purchase? So of course, we're using Shopify. And there's no onboarding process. It's like you buy the book, you enter in your address, we ship you the book. We ship it as fast as humanly possible. All right, there's nothing to really change there, but the only thing that we've done, and we've done this over time, at first, we were doing print on demand. Right? So you would buy a book from us, the company would print it Lulu in this case, and they would ship it. Well, that can be very frustrating for a customer because they're so used to getting books from Amazon or the bookstore that they're getting their books pretty fast. You know, within like two to three business days.

12:30More like two business days. But our process was ten business days because we had to print the book and ship it. So I was like, okay, that is not easy to use. That is you are adding frustration and complexity to just accessing the product. So we did a few things to make this better. Okay, one thing we did was we obviously just the biggest thing we did was say, okay, it's ludicrous that a person has to wait ten days. How do we cut that in half? Very simple. We need to have the books already printed. It can't be a print on demand thing. Okay, so we print the books in bulk and we ship them ourselves quicker. So instead of waiting the print time, now they're only waiting the ship time. So that cuts it in half. A side benefit to doing that was sometimes a book that's printed on demand would get shipped,

13:34but no one checked it. No one like flipped through the pages. So what happens is like somebody would get a book and they're like, hey, this glue didn't work. And it fell apart. So there was no QA, no quality assurance, no quality control. And so that would happen sometimes, which is just even worse. So it's like, okay, it's basically just that simple act, which was a big act, solved two very key issues. QA, it added some type of quality assurance into the process because we were feeling the books in our hands before packing them. And we couldn't tell Lulu to do that. They just didn't do that. And that's fine. Now I'm expecting to. And we were able to ship it faster, but not only that, they were shipping it in cardboard boxes, right? So we thought, okay, man, it's kind of nice to have a cardboard box. Here's a problem though. Carbore boxes can get wet and the wetness can damage the book.

14:35But a plastic bubble wrap is as more protection to the book and makes it basically waterproof. So that huge act solved a bunch of little tiny things that maybe nobody thinks about, but I think is incredibly important. And then all we've done since then, since improving all of that, is we now have a different, like, so we were doing it ourselves, Steph and I at our house, shipping these books out, and there was a problem. The problem was we're not shipping books seven days a week. We're only shipping books Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So if you ordered a book on Friday night, it wasn't getting shipped out to some time Monday afternoon. And really that was Tuesday because we would pack and ship the books, schedule a pickup for Tuesday. So we were causing a delay in the shipping process because that's not what we do.

15:35So we hired a 3PL, a third party logistics company to ship our books. Here's what happened by doing that. Yes, we increased our, I should say we decreased our margin because now we have somebody else doing it. But that company does it instantly. A book comes in, an order comes in, and that book is shipped within 30 minutes. Like it's in the mail within 30 minutes. So it probably shaves on average like two to three days off the shipping time. So customers are now getting their book much faster in a protected bubble wrap cover, you know, instantly. So all of these things are, it's a, it sounds so trivial. But why not? We didn't change the book at all. We just changed the experience. Now we did something else.

16:36We said, okay, well, you bought this book. And it's going to take a while for you to get it. It may take three business days, possibly four business days. Now I'm probably not four, probably three. I'll say on average three. Now that's pretty fast. Everyone's happy with that, okay? The book's protected when it shows up. All of these things are good. But we thought, let's take it a step further. Let's give them a book instantly. So what we did was we said, hey, as soon as you buy the book, we'll send you the PDF of the book. And so now it's not just a physical book. You get a physical and a digital book. And so that has been, it's like, it feels, because you know, you're paying a premium for this product because we're a small company. We're, you know, this was a specialized book itself published. We don't have the big, you know, companies back in the stop.

17:37We don't, you know, all the marketing is done by us. We're paying for all of that. So for us, it's like, and we're not in any traditional bookstores, et cetera, et cetera. So like, we can do things that bookstores can't do. And that's just the very basic thing that we've done. I know that we can come up with even more things, right? We could, because you're buying it directly from us, we have an ability to send you things via email. And we have the ability now because of 3PL, we can add postcards or other things to the package. And it may mean, and this is something we might do. We might switch from using media mail to something even a bit faster so that we can add something special in the, in the packaging. Now, I don't know what that would be, how that would be some sort of value add. But there are still more things that we can do to make the product easier to consume.

18:38You know, perhaps we include a bookmark, or perhaps we include a some sort of like easy reference cheat sheet to go along with the book. And maybe that doubles as a bookmark, who knows, right? So there are still more levers we can pull and we can make the shipping a little bit faster. So it's like, okay, let's do all of those things. Why not? What about our course? How do you make, like, let's forget about changing the course even though we are, right? We're updating every single lesson in the course. We're adding new lessons. We're going to be doing live events where those will be uploaded as well. You can get digital downloads that you won't be able to get anywhere else, etc. But how do you make using and consuming the product easier? And this is something I'm still thinking about. But the first thing that comes to mind is like, have a better onboarding process.

19:42Right now, and this is a tech issue. We are trying desperately to solve, and we need to solve it this year. Because we are going to be selling this course. The problem that we're running into right now is when someone buys a course, it goes through Zapier or Zapier, and it triggers an email from Podia, which gets sent to the customer. Now, that is set to instant, but it doesn't always fire correctly. And it's not always super instant, right? Sometimes, a customer doesn't even check their email. So, like, how, yes, what else can you do? Well, for us, one thing I think would make the product easier is when you purchase something, you should have a link, or it should immediately redirect you to the course. Like, you should be able to instantly log in and take the course.

20:47I know so many people who sell courses, and the process is always, okay, thank you for your purchase within the next 15 minutes. We're going to send you a login instructions, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, it's just a little, you're making me log in, bro. Come on. I just bought the damn thing. I can log in later. When I want to re-access it, I can log in later. But give me instant access. You know I bought it. Here I am on this page. Give me access right now. And then, yeah, I'll set up my account later. Right? Okay, great. So, that way I can re-access it. That's a better flow. It means not being on Podia. It means being on a different platform. We may even have to build something custom, but I know that there are some platforms baked into Shopify that we could use. And we may have to. And then, eventually build our own thing.

21:48But, that comes with time, but it comes with attention to trying to make the product better. But another thing we could do is create a series of onboarding emails and a series of onboarding videos on how to use this course effectively. How to, you know, why it's important to set up an account. Why here? Here's where everything is located. Give them a tour of what, of where everything is. Show them what they're going to learn. Help them make decisions so that they're not stuck in like, well, I bought this course, where do I begin? Just help, just help them begin. On board them. You can do this through email, a combination of email and in the course itself. You should have a whole section just called start here. Or the dashboard of your course should just have a video that's like, you must watch this first before you go forward. And you must make sure these things are done.

22:48It's going to make the process better. And obviously you can't do too many things. There's like a balance there. But it makes the product easier to use. And then you say, hey, if you ever, you know, there's like stupid little things. I recommend bookmarking this. So that way you always know where it is. I recommend, you know, we'll send you an email to remind you every once in a while about, you know, that the course even exists. So that you can access it again. Hey, is there anything missing in the course? We're, we'll create it for you. You know what I mean? It's like, did this course not answer a specific question? Let's, let's either point you physically to the correct place. Because maybe we just use our customer service department to do that. We say, hey, it's been a few days. I hope you've been able to watch the course. If you haven't, check it out.

23:48But if you have any questions about the course that the course did not answer, let us know what they are. And we will do our best to make videos, upload them, and send you an email when we do. That's fucking awesome, isn't it? When you love that, if the course creator was constantly improving the product you bought, like a Tesla, wouldn't that be great? No one does that shit. Nobody does that. And here's the thing, you're making the product better in, in turn. Like that's what you're doing. And then people feel like they're being listened to. They just spent 150 bucks. That's, that may seem like not that much money, but dude, that's a lot of money. If I spent 150 bucks and like, the product was just like, I would be pissed. But if it felt like they at least were trying to make it easy for me to consume,

24:48then I'd be like, this is, this is, this was worth the money. Before I even learned anything, make it worth it. You know, take care of people. And finally, like I'm doing the same thing in our app, where I'm thinking, what is, like every piece of feedback we get on the app. You don't have to take everything seriously, right? But you have to listen. How do we make the onboarding process easier? How do we make this product stupid, easy to use? Like for us, it was just like, everything should be clickable. Everything should feel big and bold and in your face and, and simple. Let's not junk it up with like a crappy interface where you're like trying to shove spreadsheets and, and, and charts and graphs into an app. It's like, yeah, there are some people who like think that's cool.

25:48But it doesn't make the product easier to use. For a lot of people, it just makes it more confusing. And, and really, what it is. I think what makes products easier to use is you, you create the onboarding system. And then you start removing. It's a lot of editing. I think, when I think about the book example, I think a lot about, did we really add anything? No. But the only thing we really added was you get the book instantly via email. But everything else was subtracting. You know, it's like it, we were subtracting days from when you would get the book. We're just making it faster. We're making it, you know, everything in the book that made it easier was about making the fonts bigger. So literally, we're moving unnecessary paragraphs.

26:49Making big, bold choices. And going, this is easy. It's really about editing. And our app is a perfect example of that. Our app does one thing. Right now, it does two things. It, you can test your water and it will give you a water treatment plan for your pool, for your pool specifically. And it has educational videos that are different than what you'll find on our YouTube channel in our course and even on our social media. So, and the education is very on demand. So it's like very specific. That's all the app does right now. And it's so hard to keep it like that because that is what we're selling. And what I keep doing is looking at that process and going, okay, what can we remove from it to make it easier? You know, yes, we're adding some things here and there because it's like, oh, we realize that like people need to see this. But other than that, it's like, we're not adding a bunch of new features all the time.

27:52We're trying to improve the existing feature so that it's easier to use. And that's really all I have to say is like, it's just, I think a lot of products could use just a lens of how do we make this product easier to use. And in turn, I think you will make your products better without changing the actual product itself. So that's where I'll end it. Shoot me an email. Let me know what you think. ManitMoneyLab.co. I'll talk to you next time.