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How you can design absolutely killer products using the four-quadrants framework for your next project.

Overview

Let’s face it: designing a new product or experience from the ground-up can be daunting, even for the most seasoned designers.

Over the years, I’ve developed a simple but powerful framework that I use for virtually all of my design projects to give myself a crucial competative edge.

Today, I want to share that system with you, and how you can design absolutely killer products using the four-quadrants framework for your next project.

The Four Quadrants

The four-quadrants framework is quite possibly the simplest, most straightforward way to help you and your team identify gaps in the market, user needs/expectations, and help you create something that over-delivers to a degree that engagement becomes essentially automatic.

The Four-Quadrants Framework

Let’s talk about it.

1. What do they have?

This is the first and most obvious question that you need to be asking yourself, your users, your team, and your stakeholders:

• What do your users already have?
• What solutions already exist for them to use?
• What do your users currently take for granted?
• What do your customers consider baseline or standard?

Before you can design a great product, you have to understand what the current baseline is that your users are accustomed to.

2. What do they want?

Next, what do your users actually want? This seems obvious, but I’m not talking about features here; I’m talking about cold, hard results and real outcomes.

• What do your users actually want?
• What real, tangible results do they crave?
• How do they really want to feel?
• What are their dreams, hopes, and desires?
• What do they desperately need?

Once you understand what a user has, and you understand what they really, truly want, you can begin to synthesize a much clearer picture of what your solution will need to have in order to land well with your target customers.

3. What do they expect?

Ah, now this one is often overlooked and it’s where we get into the more advanced portions of this framework. After understanding what your users have and what they want, we need to know what they expect.

• What do your users expect out of their current operations?
• What do your users think is going to happen?
• Do they think their needs will be fulfilled? Why or why not?
• How are their current expectations influencing their experiences? Are they making them better or worse?
• Do your users expect miracles? If so, what kind of miracles?
• Do your users expect a bad experience? If so, why?

You see where I’m going with this. Expectations are directly garnered from previous experiences combined with desires and product promises, so we need to establish what their expectations are for the next, most important part of this framework.

4. How can we exceed those expectations?

This is the payoff, the money shot, the coup de grâce. Once you have a solid, clear understanding of what your users have, what they want, and what they expect, this is where you and your team can begin to extract the most important information: how can we exceed those expectations?

• How can we build something that exceeds these expectations in as many ways as possible?
• How can we design for, around, and to support their desired outcomes?
• How can we give them way more of what they want and way less of what they don’t?
• How can we create an experience that emphasizes their desires and puts them first at every turn?

These questions are the beating heart of quality, impactful product design. In a world full of products, its important to show your users just how much you value them, their time, and their effort by crafting products that greatly exceed their expectations.

Bringing it all together

So what have we learned?

The four-quadrants framework is a simple, but powerful framework that you and your team can use to help create high quality products.

• What do they have?
• What do they want?
• What do they expect?
• How can we exceed those expectations?

After that it’s just a matter of designing, testing, learning and repeating.