Maybe you’ve had this experience: I download a shiny new app, I’m excited about the one necessary task this application will allow me to do easier and better – and I can’t wait to get started….mostly because I’m a little short on time. I’ve even bought the premium version because I really believe in the usefulness of this app and I can see myself using it in multiple situations.
I’m exactly where the designers want me to be.
Time Management Anyone?
I pay with my credit card, I hit the required buttons to download and then…
I’m in a tutorial. A 30 minute tutorial. I don’t really have 30 minutes, but maybe I can advance through the screens and get the hang of it…
But now I’m faced with choices. Decisions to make. Lots of them. Each choice I make leads to another page worth of info on how to utilize this app with the choice I just made. This thing now wants me to engage with it over way more time than I want to give it. Maybe I should schedule an appointment for it on my calendar so that I can truly give it my undivided attention because surely I’m the one at fault, right? If I were savvier with technology, I’d have already had this up and working. But now I have to ask…
What happened to the one necessary task I downloaded the app for to begin with?
Good Design Starts with Respecting Your Customer
Maybe it’s just because I’m from a generation that wasn’t birthed into a culture of endless choices. Or maybe my frustration is due to larger issues than just this one pesky situation.
These days I find myself more aware of the way products and processes are designed. My learning has been amplified recently through the development process of an online product of my own, and the choices my team and I have consciously, sometimes painfully made, to produce it.
The Why of Bad Design
A recent article by Scott Berkun in Fast Company titled Why So Many Products are Badly Designed explores why so many products are badly designed, and how, decades ago, faulty user experience was not the fault of the user, but of the designer.
These days however, customers who run into a tech issue won’t find a customer service phone number anywhere on the website, but they will find multiple lists of FAQ’s and troubleshooting links, and can expect to spend at least a half hour coursing through this material. Maybe there’ll be a chat feature to an invisible entity on the other end that resembles a customer service representative, but this is never guaranteed.
Whatever we can find to solve our customer service problem, it’s up to us to deal with it, and it’s our time spent solving it.
What about the User Experience?
When this happens to me, I have to wonder: How much research went into the actual user experience of a particular online application and how well was the problem it was supposed to solve researched prior to development?
Define the Problem
This brings us to the first consideration in assessing design: definition of the problem. That process might seem simple on the surface, but if you come at an issue from a 360 degree view: it becomes exponentially more complex.
Design Thinking Anyone?
By now, you have probably heard of design thinking, and the comprehensive benefits of this process. In an article titled Why Design Thinking Works by Jeanne Liedtka, the research elements required in problem definition become clear: ethnographic research, constant reframing of the problem, and a continual process to distill it down to its essence.
Product Development Challenge: Virtual Meeting Experience
I found this element to be a challenge and time-consuming to a degree I did not expect. I developed Nugget through an online class offered last spring. I knew that I wanted to address, somehow, the lack of engagement I and so many of my colleagues were experiencing in online meetings, but it wasn’t until many months later that I could find an aspect of the problem to focus on – taking comprehensive notes while trying to stay engaged online, (or having to spend time reviewing the video after) and apply a development process.
Beware Built-in Design Bias
Even after the discovery of a problem to address, developers may have defined the issue according to a very small potential customer base. Again, design thinking can help avert our very human tendency to develop solutions based on our own biases. And, as Liedtka puts it: “Defining problems in obvious, conventional ways, not surprisingly, often leads to obvious, conventional solutions.” Diverse input is key to avoiding this issue, but our tendency towards biased design starts very early, even before a specific process begins.
Scott Berkun writes about an interesting fissure in higher education between technology and design, with the resulting absence of what he calls “interdisciplinary insights”. Given that so many collegiate tech classes are filled almost exclusively by white male students, this problem could be expanded to other absences: intercultural, interracial, intergenerational insights and perspectives among them.
Analogous Field Thinking
Years ago, when it began to be clear that “silo’d” perspectives were anathema to innovation, a somewhat clunky term entered into the vernacular: analogous field thinking. Its essential meaning had to do with the active and intentional solicitation of input from fields and disciplines beyond what may be the most obvious areas. Curiosity and persistence are critical in analogous field applications, along with a healthy dose of humility, and the underlying assumption that developers don’t know everything they need to know about the impacts of a potential design.
If we are going to create a solution to a problem, it helps to start very small with the super specific problem your product solves, and then enlarge your thinking to embrace a wider field of new input, often from surprising places!
I’d love to get your feedback on Nugget – Sign up for a quick demo here!