Self-service product design principles inspired by real-world objects

We come across machines, devices, objects, and applications in our day-to-day life. Almost all are optimistic, built to solve all our problems in one way or the other. This is a short article on what it really means to be self-serve for a digital product and it’s totally inspired by observing a geyser that too has a state and behavior that we would have ignored.

Geyser at my home with a tiny plastic ring helps in installing and uninstalling it easily.

💡 Inspired by geyser
We use a lot of products and some are designed to perfection that you almost forget it exist and how it solves the problem. Especially some are totally self-serve. A most common assumption about being self-serve is we expect it to be the internet of things, smart, one that comes with a digital assistant or which is easily installable and functions with the limited tools that you have and maintain. But that not all it, some times an electrical device such as a geyser could have been designed with care, totally self-serve, and can come with a native tool (In digital applications referred to as features) that is efficient enough to install depending on a third-party tool (In digital applications referred as Third-party plugin).

💯 Principles of self-service Product design

These are some of the high-level principles or core abilities of truly self-serve product design inspired by the geyser.

• An application that can be easily installed and onboarded.
• Need no third-party application to be fully functional.
• Easier to migrate without a need for external tools/plugins or orchestrations.
• Totally proactive, solve issues and help complete tasks.
• And finally an unintrusive design and performance of features that needs zero learnability.

✏️ Self-service in product design
User experience design should literally be uninterrupted in all circumstances whatsoever and helps achieve the goals seamlessly. Sometimes tiny design additions to the features like the tiny lightweight piece of ring acting as a spanner in geyser which makes it totally independent, thoughtful additions to experience designs in a product can help it being totally self-serve which almost makes users forget that it exists.

🙏 Thanks for reading!