I have a big family. That means I have lots of cousins and family celebrations.
When I was a kid, whenever we were at a party and my father was tired and wanted to go home he would say to my mum “darling let’s go, the kids are tired”. Needless to say, I was having fun and not tired at all.
“The kids are tired” was my dad’s way of saying “I want to go”.
As a Product/UX Consultant I hear clients repeat a variation of this over and over: “users want…”, “users don’t like…”. But when you go a little deeper “users” are actually “my boss”, “I think” or “I’d like”.
A few years ago, way before User Research was popular, I remember discussing a log in screen and my boss saying “users don’t do X anymore”, but I knew he actually wanted to copy one of our main competitors just to be safe and that was his way of justifying his opinion.
Just last week I was at a meeting where changing the UI (look and feel) of a key screen was proposed as one of the ways to improve conversion. As if a prettier design would make usability problems go away. The “Let’s improve conversion” was the Product Director’s way of saying “let’s make it pretty”.
While we don’t argue that design doesn’t play a role in conversion, aesthetics are hardly the main answer to the problem.
This time around, I just happened to have conducted user research for this screen and I knew that design was not the reason for low conversion. Some functional aspects of the design were causing confusion, but the look and feel was not the underlying problem; insights showed the problem was outside the screen.
In fact, aesthetics, unless they get in the way of navigation, content comprehension, or affect the perception of the product, is hardly noticed by the users.
Everybody feels entitled to talk about design because it is the easiest thing to “understand” and justify. And because aesthetics appeal to emotions and by definition, no emotion is wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with “I like” or “I think” but as Product Managers we need to be responsible and take it for what it is: a hypothesis to be validated not a fact to act upon. And let’s conduct user research, A/B testing or look at analytics.
So next time someone says “the kids are tired” go check on them and see how they are doing.
I have a big family. That means I have lots of cousins and family celebrations.
When I was a kid, whenever we were at a party and my father was tired and wanted to go home he would say to my mum “darling let’s go, the kids are tired”. Needless to say, I was having fun and not tired at all.
“The kids are tired” was my dad’s way of saying “I want to go”.
As a Product/UX Consultant I hear clients repeat a variation of this over and over: “users want…”, “users don’t like…”. But when you go a little deeper “users” are actually “my boss”, “I think” or “I’d like”.
A few years ago, way before User Research was popular, I remember discussing a log in screen and my boss saying “users don’t do X anymore”, but I knew he actually wanted to copy one of our main competitors just to be safe and that was his way of justifying his opinion.
Just last week I was at a meeting where changing the UI (look and feel) of a key screen was proposed as one of the ways to improve conversion. As if a prettier design would make usability problems go away. The “Let’s improve conversion” was the Product Director’s way of saying “let’s make it pretty”.
While we don’t argue that design doesn’t play a role in conversion, aesthetics are hardly the main answer to the problem.
This time around, I just happened to have conducted user research for this screen and I knew that design was not the reason for low conversion. Some functional aspects of the design were causing confusion, but the look and feel was not the underlying problem; insights showed the problem was outside the screen.
In fact, aesthetics, unless they get in the way of navigation, content comprehension, or affect the perception of the product, is hardly noticed by the users.
Everybody feels entitled to talk about design because it is the easiest thing to “understand” and justify. And because aesthetics appeal to emotions and by definition, no emotion is wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with “I like” or “I think” but as Product Managers we need to be responsible and take it for what it is: a hypothesis to be validated not a fact to act upon. And let’s conduct user research, A/B testing or look at analytics.
So next time someone says “the kids are tired” go check on them and see how they are doing.
