I recently had a phone interview with one of the giant internet companies and was asked how I'ld design & implement a web product that provides users some kind of info. I didn't answer as well as I felt I could with my experience creating and implementing software applications to date hence my decision to write this.
The points listed below prove useful for both software developers, product designers and those who do both. They serve well for all kinds of technology products from web sites to mobile apps & more. I'll use one of the hottest products of the last decade to elaborate: Facebook.
CLIF stands for Content, Look & Feel, Implementation & Features.
- Content - It's the blood of your product - probably the most defining factor of your product's success. It is what
the user consumes by making use of your product, what they keep coming back for. It could be manually uploaded (news site), user generated (facebook), tapped (rss) or autogenerated (Google search) etc. But you've got to figure out how to generate that useful, relevant and probably structured content. One big reason why Facebook is so successful is because the content is ever fresh and mostly authentic.
- Look & Feel - Its the skin of your product - content is very important but it must be well presented. Your
product look & feel describes concepts such as the user experience, graphic & theme design etc. It determines the frequency of visits, interaction & recommendations you'll get from your users. It's very important to keep it simple, easy to understand or use and as fast as possible to access and navigate to the most used areas. Facebook has a cool user experience (thats why it overtook MySpace and co) with a consistent blue theme.
- Implementation - this covers the tools and technology you'll require to develop the product. It also involves the process and timeline to implement the features outlined in the point below and in what comes first and what next. Things to consider include scalability, maintainability and cost of the technology to be used. Its the brain behind your product. Technologies used at Facebook include C/C++,Java, Python,, Linux, MySQL, PHP and more.
- Features: well this is the spine of your product. These are the functions your provide the user with in order to interact with your content. The features you provide depend heavily in the kind of content you serve and how the user consumes that content. Different apps allow users to save, share, comment, review, recommend, search, vote, filter through the content provided. Facebook is ever engaging because of the features that allow people to connect, share and interact with friends such as likes, comments, suggestions, recommendations, tag etc.
