DESIGN

Product Owners — You Should Avoid Making These 3 Mistakes

You really don’t know your user.

Are you trying to be your own user?

It’s sad that real users are often not a part of the entire design process — be it a website or an application. You as a stakeholder already know about your services, but your users don’t. You carry the passion for your business identity, but your users don’t.

Business and product owners often quote one or more of the following 3 mistaken beliefs they have:

#01 — I Can Step Into My User’s Shoes, so I Can Tell Their Preferences

Seriously, this is the most common syndrome of business owners.

We should appreciate that it is not just difficult, but impossible to not have a certain bias 👈, as owners. The assumptions on user’s taste and preferences will always have many holes and gaps.

You can’t match the attitude of your users. You can’t predict how they’ll want to get things done on your website/application.

Surprisingly, even usability-driven larger product companies commit this blunder. How else can you explain disasters named Google Buzz and Google Wave?

👉 Read the Google Buzz failure story…

#02 — I Want to Surprise My Users by Not Involving Them

Surprise or not, this is a guaranteed recipe for shocking your users.

This disconnect has proven in the past to be almost irreversible in nature. Most who fall into this category do not involve users to maintain secrecy of their application. This is more common in startups.

They don’t realize that great products are never built in isolation. Your product will become great only if it is shared and tested upfront by the intended end users.

One of my designer friends narrated her recent experience with a client, which I found really amusing. She was designing their portal and after engaging with the representative users, came up with a 1-click logout mechanism (from every page).

The client insisted that they wanted users to struggle 🤔 and spend more time on the portal before logging out. So they asked her to make the logout mechanism subtle and hard to find.

I wonder whether this forced surprise is going to work in favor or against the application! Any guesses? This is a case of a dark pattern, resulting from an unnecessary fetish about surprising the user.

👉 Read more about dark/deceptive patterns…

#03 — My Users Are Not Experts, They Don’t Know What They Want

Classic excuse!

Maybe you would know what feature your product should have or what content your website should have. It still does not tell you “how” users will use the feature or browse the content.

Irony of the argument is that since your users are not “experts” it is even more necessary to engage with them during design phase. We should stop suggesting our expertise and open up our perspective for the users.

Care ONLY about what your users think of themselves as a result of interacting with your creation.

Read this nice article that quotes the above☝️ line, in context of our subject.

Takeaway

In conclusion, whether it’s interviews, surveys, testing with users, contextual inquiries or card sorting — anything will do as a process of connecting with your users.

Let’s not pretend to be our own users; we are least capable of playing the role, no matter what the IQ/EQ.

Copyright © 2022 Vishal Mehta. All Rights Reserved.

Sharing few more articles from the web on this subject and the anti-thesis (you actually might be your user!):

Thanks for reading!

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