LOUD & PROUD
LOUD & PROUD
How To Be LOUD & PROUD With New Design Features.
There’s a lot of design ways to introduce new features in your product. Two of the popular ways are to to add tooltips or pop up a modal.
Here’s a few examples:
And this are not bad ways. 100% they make sense to use. But I’m really digging what Canva and Shopify are doing:
LOUD & PROUD
Both Canva and Spotify are being very loud and and proud of new features. No simple modal or tooltips here, but rather a whole experience.
Check out Canva’s UX on showcases new updates:
WHAT THE CANVA DESIGN DOES WELL
Dedicated SITE WITHIN THE APP
Within the Canva app, there is a dedicated site. This helps with discovery and gives plenty of space to the new features.
Simple GIFS Communicate Value
GIFs are for more than memes. You can quickly get across the benefits of a new features with minimal effort from the user. Canva has a great use of gifs to get across 1)the new features, 2)how to use them, and 3) the benefit to the customer.
Highlights Benefits
It’s important customer pain points so you can 1) solve them and 2) let them know you solved them and 3) and here’s the payoff of that solution. Canva nails it with the UX, and then in this site, nails highlighting the benefit.
Speak to the roles
Canva knows they have very different roles using their services. They speak to these roles (marketing, sales, creative, HR) in this page.
SHOPIFY UX
Shopify does a similar thing to announce new features. Every summer and winter they release what they call Editions - a way to publish all the changes they built.
They created a dedicated site and - well let’s just say the designers get to have a lot of fun. Check out the latest from Winter Editions 2024:
IT’s FUN
There’s an option to select a “Not Boring” option. Doing so brings an old school TV and Remote on screen and you can flip through channels. Each channel is an AI generated video highlighting new features.
It’s so fun and feels like the team had fun doing it.
And it might not be your cup of tea but the point remains: they are loud and proud of what they do. And clearly they spent a lot of time one it.
It shows they care and they are proud of what they are releasing.
THEY HAD FUN
IT’s “BORING”
They have a “boring” version which is plain text, simple images, and hyperlinks.
Real old school internet stuff.
PROUD OF DESIGN WORK
Personally, I love all of this because it’s a way to be proud of the design work done. And as designers, you should be proud. Both teams shipped great work that helped their customers.
SHIP GOOD WORK
Obviously this all starts with good, quality work. Understanding the customer pain points and delivering on well design products serves as the base of being loud and proud of your work.
IT HELPS CUSTOMERS
If you’re doing great design work, it benefits customers. In this day and age, it’s tough to get a customers attention. Why not be very vocal about it:
“HEW WE RELEASED SOME AWESOME NEW FEATURES THAT ARE TOTALLY GOING TO HELP YOU OUT AND MAKE YOU EVEN MORE OF A ROCKSTAR!”
CUSTOMER LOYALTY
All this helps to further brand loyalty. It lets customers know of awesome new features. I use Canva and Shopify and I love seeing these new features that I might otherwise gloss over if it was a simple tooltip.
It also lets me know the company is invested in still shipping great work that’ll help me as a customer.
DESIGN 🤝 Marketing
There’s always a push to foster collaboration between product designers / ux designers and product management, and engineering.
Marketing is often left out of that convo.
In my experience, marketing is a key factor to foster collaboration for reasons like this.
A product designer can design a great experience that highlights new features in an engaging way.
A way that gets customers excited and more informed. Working with marketing is a way to get this done.