It’s common to talk about tech from a point of view of features and platforms, but the purpose of any piece of a product is to provide a means to get a job done by solving problems. After having a conversation about a particular feature, an interesting point of view was raised about how to lay the path from the adoption of a product to the delivery of value to the user. How functional is your product and how opinionated is it?

Functional vs Intuitive

Products come with varying amounts of ease of entry, basically, do you need to have prior knowledge or experience in order to get value from the product, or can you pick it up and go without being instructed.

Functional gives control but requires a process.

Intuitive gives ease but removes choice.

Unopinionate vs Opinionated

What a solution can look like for any problem is a subjective answer, what scenario it exists in or why a job needs to be done can yield vastly different products that result in the same outcome. How each variable is set, every dial, switch, and slider can be done by the creators of the products or left to the user.

Opinionated is guided but removes recontextualisation.

Unopinionated allows expression but needs time and effort.

Thinking about personas

When deciding on the direction of a product it could be useful to think of these attributes when in ideation and planning implementation. But as there are 2 factors both with 2 ends of a spectrum, it’s time to bring out a matrix.

From looking at various (albeit speculative) products that fall in the quadrants, we can create case studies and analyse where they succeed, but maybe for another day.