UX Design : Product or feature !!!
A lot of designers (me too) gets confused sometimes while creating a product and designing a feature. Product is something like a tangible/intangible thing in a market. Feature can be called as an USP(unique selling point) of every different tangible / intangible thing.
A new day to begin with a wonderful article. This article is about how to differentiate while designing both product / feature, so let’s get started. Do share your valuable feedback in the comments section and if you like the article do share with your designer friends.
What is a difference between a product and a feature ?
Feature vs Product differentiation
How to differentiate between product & feature ?
See, product is a complete offering that provides value to users and feature is a specific functionality or characteristic of a product that provides a particular benefit to users. 
So, Can product be a feature ?
Let’s see a most popular example of this product / feature debate happened between Drew Houston & Steve Jobs.What made Steve Jobs comment this :
Market Perspective: Jobs saw Dropbox’s core functionality — cloud storage and file synchronization — as something that could be integrated into a larger ecosystem.
Competitive Landscape: Apple was working on its cloud services, such as iCloud, which aimed to provide similar functionalities to Dropbox but as part of a broader suite of services for Apple users.
Business Model: Jobs’ comment suggested that Dropbox might struggle to remain competitive as a standalone product, especially if larger companies integrated similar features into their broader offerings.
Strategic Direction: Jobs’ view might have been an indication that Dropbox needed to innovate beyond its initial offering to develop a more comprehensive product or suite of services.
Other examples are One Drive, Google drive, Mega drive or any other cloud service can either be a feature or a product based on how it is placed in the market.
Talking about google drive, it’s a feature integrated in a product ecosystem where apart from uploading files manually, all the files are being stored by the user. But also with this, if I send a mail and it has some attachments, it gets stored in the google drive as a part of the google eco-system. which makes Gmail a dependant on a different product called Google Drive.Now if a user has an account in proton mail and uses Google drive as a tool to save all the files and docs, then for the user Google drive is just a feature of google and not a product.Another popular example is TikTok a product company which is now a feature for almost the popular social media apps.
TikTok started as a social media application where users could scroll through short videos of 5–15 seconds. It became so popular that apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (now X), Snapchat, and YouTube began adding similar features. However, this didn’t lead to TikTok’s downfall. In fact, it is one of the app with the highest time spent by users.
https://embryo.com/blog/tiktok-vs-instagram-stats/
Now let’s understand,
If a feature can be a product or not?
Mostly Yes/No because when there is an idea, it doesn’t define as a feature or a product. The difference come at the later stage of an idea mostly during brainstorming, prototyping or any other part. Let’s see some examples :
Slack — accidentally started while creating an online video gaming platform glitch. Now this company is worth $26.51 Billion used by majority Corp employees for internal connects, meetings and more.
Twitter — started as a SMS communication service now is used as a platform for trending news, blog posting, connecting with customer service and much more. It became so big that, Elon musk bought the company for $44 Billion and made it private.
There are many more such examples like this which started as an idea, later during brainstorming finalized on being a product or a feature.
But now, the question arises, if Corps brainstorm all these things, why most companies still fail ?
Corps success & failures in creating products and features.
Because of the dilemma in what they are idea is..
Based on my opinion and what I have observed is that failure of a product/ feature depends on how the certain things are marketed users perceive it. A good marketing of an idea and how user’s perceive it is necessary in making the Corp successful.
So what the Corps need to do to make sure, they fail early and make good decision in initial times so that it’s doesn’t hurt afterwards. The answer is to collaborate with DESIGNERS !!!
How a designer can differentiate between product and feature ?
Created using Recraft Ai
A designer at some point are or need to be the major stakeholders in the Corps progress. One can’t deny the fact but it’s true that without designers, visualizing anything is next to impossible for the world. Be it an idea, a machine or prototype, everything needs visualization. Keeping designers in a loop at a initial ideation phase is an excellent way to understand and differentiate between a product & a feature. But why ?
Created using Recraft Ai
Because, designers understand users market, pain points, competition, moods, user’s journey, the thought process, stakeholders, viability, usability, feasibility of the solution, create sitemaps to understand the flow, interviews the user, the product survey and much more.
I can say, designers understand the problem to it’s depth & solve it from the core.
The conclusion
No one knows what they are creating either a feature or a product when they have an idea, the only way to get know is to iterate, push, take feedbacks and keep the loop going.
As we understand the difference between product & feature, let’s see can Ai be a feature or a product in the 21st century ?
What do you think. Let me know in the discussion threads.
Thanks for reading. Do appreciate and share it with your friends.
UX Design : Product or feature !? was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
