How To Be Loud & Proud With New Design Features

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:

two examples of a modal popping up to show new UX features

two examples of a tooltips showing new UX features
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 Designs


Designing great products is not light work. You spend time talking to users, understanding their pain points.

Countless hours ideating, and wireframing.

You prototype, test, iterate and iterate.

Eventually you land on a design that crushes it. You build it and ship it. But if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it....

You ABSOLUTELY should be proud of the good work and you ABSOLUTELY should make your users aware. 

If you're confident you nailed a user problem (and since you spent time talking to your users and ideating you know you did) - then let them know.

👉They want to know.👈

Both Canva and Spotify do a good job of this. They 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 To 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
  3. the benefit to the customer.

Highlight Benefits

It’s important customer pain points so you can:

  1. Solve those pain points;
  2. Let your users know you solved them
  3. Show 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 "Boring"

They have a “boring” version which is plain text, simple images, and hyperlinks.
Real old school internet stuff.

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.

They Had Fun

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.

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. Be 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 conversation.

Marketing is a key factor to foster design 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.

Totally Unrelated But Also Very Related

I love music and love looking at other creative areas for inspiration.

One of my favorite artists today is Tyler The Creator.

He recently was talking about promoting his music and it reminded me of this post.

He's basically saying "hey you spent a ton of time crafting this album and you're only going to put up one story post?!"

It's super similar to design. Many design orgs will spend months on product features and when it's released, there's only a single insta post. Really?!

The Tyler The Creator interview clip:

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