26 January 2016

Using ethnography to build better products

Craig Mod’s essay on doing design ethnography in Myanmar is so far my favorite piece of writing of the year. In The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar he shares some notes about the team’s visits and interviews:

There is a phrase repeated over and over again during my time in Myanmar: From no power to solar, from no banks to digital currencies, from no computers and no internet to capable smartphones with fast 3G connections. It is the mantra of consultants working in these emergent economies. And these emergent economies have one colossal advantage over the entrenched and techno-gluttonous west: There is little incumbency.

There is, however, instability—in government and currency. It’s one of the reasons why a country like Myanmar is just now getting these connections, these devices. The instability significantly increases risk for outside investors and companies. But the residual effect of that instability is a lack of incumbency and traditional infrastructure. And so there is no incumbent electric giant monopolizing rural areas to fight against solar, there is no incumbent bank which will lobby against bitcoin, there are no expectations about how a computer should work, how a digital book should feel. There is only hunger and curiosity. And so there is a wild and distinct freedom to the feeling of working in places like this. It is what intoxicates these consultants. You have seen and lived within a future, and believe—must believe—you can help bring some better version of it to light here. A place like Myanmar is a wireless mulligan. A chance to get things right in a way that we couldn’t or can’t now in our incumbent laden latticeworks back home.

It’s a long article, and it should be. There’s so much insight here, just from spending a few days with people observing, listening, understanding. I don’t understand why this truth is so hard for some product leaders to understand:

A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is to undermine these assumptions, to be able to design tools and products aligned with actual observed use cases and needs.

Just imagine how different the world would be—and what incredible products we’d be able to build—if we always took the time to understand users and their needs in this way first.

25 January 2016

The convergence of Product Management and User Experience Design

Melissa Perri in Changing the Conversation about Product Management vs. UX:

Product Management with no User Experience Design creates functional products that don’t make users excited. User Experience Design with no Product Management produces delightful products that don’t become businesses.

I have a few quibbles with this article (including the idea that the role of UX is to make users excited…), but I like this quote because it ties in with a common theme I write about: the importance of combining both user needs with business goals to create successful products.

25 January 2016

When being alone on our smartphones, together, is okay

Emma Brockes wrote an essay for The Guardian called In praise of being alone on our smartphones, together:

The act of being with someone—or better yet, a group of people—and on one’s phone is just the modern iteration of a key pleasure of family life: to be among those whom one is sufficiently comfortable with to drift in and out of communication. Like doing homework at the kitchen table, it is the state of doing your own thing while others do theirs around you. The point is, whatever you are doing on your phone, it would be less pleasurable were you to be doing it alone in your room.

Screen addiction alters this, and there are levels of disengagement that can turn a sentient being into a piece of furniture, but the parameters of acceptable phone use should surely widen at this point to permit some middle way between being on one’s phone and considered rude, or turning the device off altogether.

The title of the essay is a clever reference to Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. It’s a book I enjoyed a lot, despite it being relentlessly full of depressing paragraphs like this:

Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.

[A] stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.

I recommend danah boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens as a positive palate cleanser afterwards.

Anyway, back to Emma’s article. She also references Susan Dominus’s Motherhood, Screened Off, an article that was in heavy rotation towards the end of last year. Susan makes the point that smartphones result in a lack of transparency, since people (i.e. our kids…) don’t know what we’re up to when we’re on them:

It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. […] All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific use of which is almost never apparent.

And that’s where the answer to all of this comes back to “it’s complicated.” Yes, sometimes it’s ok to be alone on our devices, together in quiet contentment. But other times the lack of transparency about what we’re doing can be incredibly alienating to others. This wouldn’t be a problem if we could tell the difference between the two situations perfectly, every time. But alas, we are only human.

21 January 2016

The streaming music ceiling

Cortney Harding makes some good points about the behaviors of different music buying personas in Is There a Streaming Ceiling?

The future is beginning to look like it will be a two tiered system — the top group of music fans will pay for streaming and everyone else will buy a handful of albums a year. Think of all the people you know who bought the Adele album, and I’ll bet that for many of them, it was the only album they bought this year. Many of these consumers aren’t all the interested in what streaming can offer them — they are content with hearing new music on the radio, buying one or two albums a year, and perhaps seeing one or two concerts.

It feels like the music industry has never been this complicated.

21 January 2016

Service design for airport restrooms

The Transportation Research Board (TSB) recently published a 100-page PDF called Guidebook for Airport Terminal Restroom Planning and Design. If I know anything about the readers of this site, it’s that this is the kind of stuff we live for. Service design for airport toilets? Sign us up!

Ian Bogost provides a handy summary of this delightful document in The Airport Restroom of the Future:

The TSB report ends with an appendix on the “Airport Restroom of the Future.” After a surprisingly detailed history of public toilets, the TSB concludes that gender-neutral restrooms would offer travelers the most relief. Not only would they better address evolving gender identity norms, but they would also reduce congestion, maintenance, and accessibility by foregoing the barriers that help create the constriction of today’s restrooms. The TSB’s mockup puts individual sink basins in stalls to avoid flow to a common sink area, and adds a spacious waiting area flanked by two “art vitrines.”

I doubt airports care much about this, but it’s at least nice to see the TSB investing in this kind of service design research.

20 January 2016

Wisdom quotes for the rest of us

Jennifer Kahn’s The Happiness Code, an article about bringing rationality to self-improvement, is interesting in and of itself. But it’s Hannah Whitaker‘s photo illustrations with lettering by Luke Lucas that really drew me in. I’m sure many of you despise pithy “wisdom quotes” as much as I do. So these are like smooth balm to a tortured soul.

Wisdom

You can see more of Hannah’s excellent work here. Luke’s personal website with some his great graphic design projects is here.

20 January 2016

Customer needs up and down the technology stack

I’ve seen Anshu Sharma’s Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy come up in my feeds a bunch of times over the last couple of days. I personally found the writing quite confusing, and had to read it several times to figure out what he was trying to say. I even drew a picture to help me.

If I understand the argument correctly, Anshu is saying that wherever your core business is in the technology stack, it’s easier to expand your market by going down the stack than up. Like so:

Stack Fallacy

This is obviously an oversimplification and leaves a lot of things out, but it was just a way for me to make sense of the article. That said, it’s this part in particular that stood out for me:

The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. Database engineers know almost nothing about what supply chain software customers want or need. They can hire for that, but it is not a core competency.

The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs.

In other words, it’s easier for Apple to take on Intel than it is for Apple to take on Facebook. Likewise, it’s easier for Amazon (AWS) to take on hardware manufacturers than it is for them to take on Salesforce. And the reason for this is that most companies understand the customer needs of the components their core business is built out of, but they don’t understand the customer needs of the businesses that other companies build using their components.

Update: This tweet from Peter Matthaei is a much better summary than the one I came up with:

.@RianVDM If your company uses something, it’s down the stack; anything that companies can build with your stuff is up the stack.

— Peter Matthaei (@mobivangelist) January 20, 2016

It’s an interesting theory, especially if you consider the logical conclusion that apps and services like Facebook and Salesforce (etc.) are at the top of the stack, and everyone not originally in the software business is going to have a really difficult time competing with them. I’d be curious to hear what others think of this…

19 January 2016

The handicap of big product teams

Most businesses don’t admit how costly things like company wide announcements, project management, interviewing, internal politics, and large scale collaboration are on productivity. They all work against flow, and should be considered a handicap on product teams. Small teams substitute process with trust, eliminating overhead.

— Kyle Neath, Million Dollar Products