Product Management: See the product through the user's eyes

Some time ago I spoke at the ISDEF conference and talked about what happens when programmers are forced to design interfaces.

In this article I will voice the main points of this report, and also share my thoughts on how the product manager should look at the product correctly.

The essence of the problem

Examples of how great programmers can design a UX come across pretty often.
For example, this is a great form of filling in the history from the workbook on the state portal. services (I already wrote about it), which kills a session 15 minutes after opening and forces the user to overload the page with the loss of all data.
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These are wonderful forms for filling in completely incomprehensible information, as in the figure to the left.

These are the closing windows of a text editor, which do not even try to offer to save the text, on which the unfortunate user spent two hours of his life.

I am very sad to work with such software. I understand that it was written by first-class specialists, I admit that the code of these systems is also in perfect order. However, I will not use them. In the extreme case, if I don’t have a choice, I’ll still “cry, prick and eat the cactus”, but at the same time I’ll ruin the karma of the developers with my own little literary comments.

Why?

Of course, we immediately have a question: why? Why is this happening? Why even the best programmers, while designing the ideal architecture and writing perfect code, make gross mistakes when designing user interaction?

Understand it easily enough. When developing a software product, first of all are needed: clarity, logic, rigorous analysis and the ability to structure the available information. According to psychologists, these are functions of the left hemisphere, responsible for logic, rational thinking and analysis.

In turn, when developing interfaces, design, creating new requirements for the product that would reduce the “pain” of the user, it is necessary not only a sense of beauty, the ability to think creatively, create and invent something new, but also a strongly developed sense of empathy - the ability to empathize with others, to put themselves in their place, to understand what they really need. This, according to the assurances of all the same psychologists, the functions of the right hemisphere, responsible for feelings and emotions.

Of course, you can collect hundreds of sheets of statistics and feedback received from users, analyze them and understand which functions most of them lack and which problems are most difficult to solve. But it will not allow you to create a truly necessary, successful and new product.

Users can not always describe what exactly they want, sometimes they do not even know it themselves. They may feel that they are "not comfortable", but very rarely can explain why. Moreover: they may misinterpret their inconvenience or try to think independently “how they would be more comfortable”, without really understanding how it would be convenient for them in fact .

As Henry Ford once said: “If I asked people what they want, they would ask for a faster horse.”

What to do?

So, what to do if users themselves do not know what they want, and if they know, they cannot formulate it normally?

First, forget the word "user." In my opinion, it is extremely harmful when designing a product. It makes sense to use it only when preparing requirements in conjunction with the “user should be able to ...”. Why? Everything is quite simple: the “user” is faceless. He has no name, gender, age, hairstyle, children who are sitting on his lap while he is working. He does not think that it is necessary to take the car to repair or cook dinner. The “user” will never exclaim “how I’m tired of making the same button ten times!”, He will never say “damn it, I again missed this element on the smartphone’s screen, because the bus shook! ”

“User”, he is “The user” or even “ Theuser ” - the most gray, weak-willed, powerless and oppressed creature on the planet.

So we forget the word "user." How to replace it? For starters, you can use a wonderful tool called " person ". Personification will allow faceless "zayuser" to find the name, person, profession and hobby. So much easier. But that's not all.

Complete reincarnation

In my opinion, we should not just use the person. We must become them. This is a very important point, which will allow us to reincarnate for a second as a sysadmin Vasya or Anya, a seller of home-made bead crafts. We should think like Vasya, want the same that Vasya wants and be completely imbued with his worries, problems and joys.

This requires advanced empathy. This requires a long and hard work, understanding your user. Not the “zeuser”, but that Vasya himself or that Ani. This work is akin to the work of an actor living in a role. But this work always brings fruit. The deeper you climb into the user's skin, the better you will understand what he needs, you will feel the pain that your product will treat.

By the way, the standards advise to form user stories , approximately in the following form: " as <role> I would like ... ". Thus, they directly put the person who writes them (and usually this is the Product Owner) in the user's place.

Eat your own dog food

Probably the easiest way to get used to the role of your user is to start using your own product yourself.

"We ourselves eat the dog food that we produce." This phrase first appeared in the 1970s in an ad for the pet food company Alpo, and is now being used by Microsoft in the development of software. Our product is so good that we use it ourselves.

Probably one of the most striking examples of this approach is the popular Git version control system. Three days after the start of the project, its source code was placed ... in Git, and further development of this tool was carried out with the help of it.

One of my friends, having come for an interview at a fairly well-known software development company, saw that the majority of employees use the software of their competitors. It didn't make sense to have an interview. He already knew that he would not work in this company.

Who needs your product if you do not use it yourself, preferring the product of competitors? What is the quality of it? Why do you release it at all, and who are you trying to fool?

If you want to develop a truly desired product, be sure to use it. Otherwise it will be very difficult to assess its quality, reliability and ease of use.

On the other hand, you need to be very clearly aware that your personal preferences may not coincide with the preferences of most users. For example, I am used to calling programs by clicking Win + R , and then I type the name of the executable file of the application being run. But I understand perfectly well that, with great probability, none of the users of our product do this.

For a product manager, it is very important to put aside your own ego and consider the product unbiased. But that's another story.

findings

In order to make a good product you need to see it through the eyes of users. You need to know the users in person, understand what they need and see their problems. And so that users become a part of you, a part of your product, a part of every feature and every decision made.

And then your product will be useful, convenient and in demand. And that means - successful.

Good luck in developing your products!