Ashish’s World!

One blog that I have started to like more and more is “Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra“. She has an excellent post on a user-focused employee guide. It’s quite a long post where she comes up with an unofficial guide to create passionate users for those working in big companies. She had just been to Microsoft and that, apparently, prompted her to write this post.

Something awesome that I saw on quite early at Microsoft, when I used to work there, was their usability lab. They would first define some personas who are the target buyers of their product and then invite few people fitting the description of those personas and will let them use the system after a brief introduction. You could see from the glass-wall the users actually using the system and discovering stuff. It was mind-boggling to see users using the system sometime in a totally different way than you would expect AND also not being able to discover stuff that you would think is so obvious.

My first lessons there: User is God. Seriously! The systems are designed for them and not for those who are designing them. If you are serious about creating a world-class product, you have to think more and more actively from a user’s perspective. And, actually no, don’t just think yourself. Involve some real users to use your system as early as possible. What is intuitive to you may not be intuitive to your users at all. Pay more than usual attention to this stuff. Technology is not something that attracts end-users, it is the value that keeps them glued to your product - and you can increase the value manifold by improving the user experience and making them more usable. And, it’s actually a matter of just developing that habit, to ingrain that in your DNA - and it becomes trivial after that. You will automatically ‘get it’ on all your subsequent products. It just adds one more step to the product development cycle (SDLC for Software) but well worth it.

The bullet-points that I really liked from Kathy’s post (I don’t agree completely with all the points she mentions but agree with the idea overall):

1. Language matters. Frame everything in terms of the user’s experience
2. Be annoyingly persistent. If you’re relentless in the previous step–always asking the question, “how does this help the user kick ass?”, it won’t take that long before the people you interact with will anticipate that you’re going to ask it, and that at least forces them to think about it for a moment.
3. Capture user stories from real users.
4. When product features are discussed without taking into account how it helps (or hinders) the user kicking ass, adopt a slightly confused, mildly annoyed look…
5. Challenge user-unfriendly assumptions every day.
6. Don’t give up. If you do, then quit at the earliest possible moment. But if you’re relentless and you slowly recruit others to your cause, you can change a culture… one small group at a time. If you succeed, even in a small way, and help shift the supertanker just one degree… that one degree eventually means a profoundly different trajectory down the road

If you haven’t still read Kathy’s post, let me remind you again. Do yourself and this world a favor - always think about your users. That is what will differentiate you from the rest. Flickr is, probably, one of the best example of this.