Monday, January 24, 2011

Two Stupid Reasons for Complicated Products

I frequently get asked by startups to simplify products. In general, companies are fantastic at coming up with great feature ideas, but they tend to find it harder to either kill underperforming features or properly integrate new ideas that got tacked on as an experiment or pivot.

Because I get called in when a company already has a product that new users find confusing, I see a lot of the same mistakes repeated. I also hear the same excuses for those mistakes.

Often, when I’m looking at a new product, I’ll find very similar features in different parts of the interface.

For example, one social product had three completely different ways of searching for friends the user might know. Now, I don’t mean that there were different criteria you could use - like email address or interests or user name. That would have been fine.

I mean there were three completely different places the user could go in the product to find three completely different features that were meant to help people search for their friends. There was huge functionality overlap among the three features, but they were all slightly different.

There’s a Reason For That


Of course, I mentioned that it seemed odd and confusing to have three different places to go to do essentially the same thing. And the product owner patiently explained to me that there was a reason for that.

The product owner then launched into a detailed description of how the first one had been built by the team as an experiment. A few months later, since the experiment went well, but was a little slow, the team migrated to a different technology for search, and built a second version of the feature alongside the first one to see if it could be faster.

Since the product owner hadn’t given them any requirements for the new version other than “go faster,” and the new technology made some of the old functionality tricky, the second version didn’t have exactly the same capabilities as the first. So, the team decided it wasn’t an adequate replacement for the old version. They released it anyway, since they’d already built it, and it was faster.

The third version of the feature had been built as part of a larger feature, but the rest of that larger feature had been killed, and only the search part remained. It had some neat new functionality that users liked, but the team felt it didn’t really replace either of the other two versions.

Moreover, the product owner explained to me that different types of users liked the various different versions of friend search, so he was hesitant to kill any of them, because whichever one he killed would upset somebody.

So, he was stuck supporting three different variations of the same feature, and new users were overwhelmed by choice for where they were supposed to go to find their friends.

And here’s the thing: users don’t actually want this sort of choice. This sort of choice is confusing. It makes navigating the product cumbersome, and it’s unpleasantly surprising to constantly find new, slightly different ways to do the same thing.

There’s a Big Difference


This isn’t the only way that the problem manifests. Sometimes when I point out similar features in different places, the product owner reassures me that “there is a big difference” between the features.

This happened with a client when I pointed out that there were two different types of quizzes in one section of the product, but they had different names and placements. I asked why they couldn’t be combined into one section, so that the clutter on the page would be reduced and the user could always know where to go to take quizzes.

He assured me that there was a big difference between the two types of quizzes. When I asked him to elaborate, he went into detail about how the types of quizzes were different on the back end, and how one was often used as a business development tool while the other was user generated.

In other words, both of the “big differences” were things that were only different to the company. They were the sorts of differences that a user would never notice. All a user would notice would be that the quizzes were sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, which would be confusing and frustrating if she was looking for that feature.

How to Avoid This


Take a hard look at your product. Are there any similar features? You’ll be surprised at how often the answer is yes. If there are, ask yourself what your reasons were for building the different variations.

If your reasons for building different versions of the same feature are based entirely on technology or business development (in other words, things that only matter to YOU and not your users), you’ve got a problem.

The most customer friendly way of dealing with it is to try to come up with a superset of the best functionality from all the versions and improve one of the versions until it satisfies as many user stories as possible.

But even if you don’t have the time or resources to consolidate them into one great version of the product, just killing the duplicated features will ultimately simplify your product and make it more useful and understandable for all of your customers.

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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Lean UX - A Case Study

For those very, very few (ok, none) of you who read my blog but don't read Eric Ries's blog, Startup Lessons Learned, I have some exciting news for you. But first, why the hell aren't you reading Eric's blog? You really should. It's great.

I've a written a guest post that now appears on the Startup Lessons Learned blog. It's a case study of a UX project I did with the lean startup Food on the Table.

If you're wondering whether design works well with lean startups, I answer that question in the post. Spoiler alert: The answer is 'yes'.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Testing Whether Your Users Will Buy

As you all know by now, I’m a huge proponent of qualitative user testing. I think it’s wonderful for learning about your users and product.

But it’s not a panacea. The fact is, there are many questions that qualitative testing either doesn’t answer well or for which qualitative testing isn’t the most efficient solution. I cover some of them in my A Faster Horse post.

The trick is knowing which questions you can answer by listening to your users and which questions need a different methodology.

Unfortunately, one of the most important questions people want answered isn’t particularly well suited to qualitative testing.

If I Build It, Will They Buy?

I get asked a lot whether users will buy a product if the team adds a specific feature. Sadly, I always have to answer, “I have no idea.”

The problem is, people are terrible at predicting their future behavior. Imagine if somebody were to ask you if you were going to buy car this year. Now, for some of you, that answer is almost certainly yes, and for others it’s almost certainly no. But for most of us, the answer is, “it depends on the circumstances.”

For some, the addition of a new feature - say, an electric motor - might be the deciding factor, but for many the decision to buy a car depends on a lot of factors, most of which aren’t controlled by the car manufacturer: the economy, whether a current car breaks down, whether we win the lottery or land that job at Goldman Sachs, etc. There are other factors that are under the control of the car company but aren't related to the feature: maybe the new electric car is not the right size or isn't in our price range or isn't our style.

This is true for smaller purchases too. Can you absolutely answer whether or not you will eat a cookie this week? Unless you never eat cookies (I'm told these people exist), it’s probably not something you give a lot of thought to. If somebody were to ask you in a user study, your answer would be no better than a guess and would possibly even be biased by the simple act of having the question asked.

Admit it, a cookie sounds kind of good right now, doesn’t it?

There are other reasons why qualitative testing isn't great at predicting future behavior, but I'm not going to bore you with them. The fact is, it's just not the most efficient or effective method for answering the question, "If I build it, will they come?"

What Questions Can Qualitative Research Answer Well?

Qualitative research is phenomenal for telling you whether your users can do x. It tells you whether the feature makes sense to them and whether they can complete a given task successfully.