Most digital products look fancy but nobody ever uses them. The fix isn't more features. It's purpose and early usability testing.
🎯 Purpose
A digital product is any software-based service (a website, app, or platform) built to deliver specific value to a defined user. Too many of them ship without that foundation in place.
A digital product shouldn't just follow trends or gut feeling. It should fulfill a clear goal — ideally one that's tightly linked to a company's vision and business objectives. That purpose creates a red thread through the entire product journey. It keeps us focused and lean instead of getting lost in feature chaos.
A quick hack for a purpose could be to simply answer the question:
👉 Why are you actually creating this product/app? What do you want to achieve with it?
🐟 Testing
There's a saying: "The worm must taste good to the fish, not the fisherman." With our years of experience, we can often make informed assumptions about what users might need. But to know for sure, we have to get out there and test — to learn directly from real interactions. This is often way simpler than it sounds.
Usability testing is the practice of watching real people try to use a product before launch, and it's the cheapest insurance a product team can buy. A simple way to do this early in the process:
👉 Facade Testing
👉 Paper Prototyping
👉 Or even usability tests on wireframes or sketches
The point isn't process perfection. It's catching the obvious gaps before they cost you a year of development.
Read next:
- Do we need to dare more again? — the testing argument, taken further
- The disaster of German railway is a perfect example for the importance of systemic thinking — why a purpose has to span the whole system, not just one product
- Diversity of Perspective Drives Better Design — the missing input most product teams don't realize they need
FAQ
What is purpose-driven design?
Purpose-driven design is the practice of starting every product decision from a clearly stated user need and business goal, rather than from trends, feature parity with competitors, or internal opinion. The purpose is a one-sentence answer to why the product exists and what it must achieve, and it acts as the filter for every later tradeoff.
Why do so many digital products go unused after launch?
Most failed products share two root causes. They were built around an assumption about user behavior that was never tested, and they accumulated features faster than any of them were validated. When the only feedback loop is internal, the product optimizes for the team that built it, not the person it is supposed to serve.
How do you test a digital product before launch?
The cheapest methods work earliest. Paper prototyping (sketching screens on paper and walking users through tasks) and facade testing (a clickable surface that looks like the real product but routes to dummy screens) both surface usability problems in days, not weeks. Wireframe-level usability tests are the next step up. The point is not to find every issue but to catch the obvious ones before they cost a year of development.
What is the difference between facade testing and paper prototyping?
Paper prototyping uses hand-drawn or printed screens and a facilitator who swaps them in response to the user's actions. Facade testing uses a digital clickable surface that mimics the final product but routes clicks to placeholder content. Paper prototyping is faster and cheaper; facade testing is closer to the real experience and better for testing navigation and information architecture.
When is the right time to start usability testing?
As early as you have something a person can react to, even a rough sketch counts. The earlier you test, the cheaper the fixes. A problem caught on paper takes minutes to resolve; the same problem caught after launch takes a sprint, a release, and usually a row with the roadmap.