Last week, my son turned four years old. He’s a bright young man; he’s been reading for about six months. When I say “reading”, I mean he can READ read. He’s looking over my shoulder right now reading what I’m writing (trust me, it’s weird).
My wife and I believe that he learned so well by watching some learning videos called ‘Preschool Prep’. Really, he soaks up anything and everything he watches. He read the word ‘oasis’ a couple of days ago and my wife asked how he knew that word. He quickly referenced it back to a specific episode of ‘Justin Time Go’ and went on to explain what a mirage was. #thankstv
Anyway, my point isn’t to brag about my kid. His aptitude for reading has very little to do with me. Instead, I wanted to tell you about how he got a Strider bike for his birthday.
My wife and I were very excited about the pedal-less bike. And at first glance, he was pretty stoked, too. He climbed aboard and immediately fell over. He became less stoked.
My son wouldn’t give the Strider the time of day after that. I actually got on and tried to demonstrate how to scoot around. No interest. I adjusted the seat. He was awkward and fell right over. My wife spent an hour trying to help him balance and see how fun it could be to no avail. We were super disappointed.
Then she had an idea. She searched and was able to find a single two-minute clip of a Strider bike race on YouTube. She turned it on for our son and stepped back to observe.
Within five minutes, he was zipping around the family room; then the driveway; then the circle. He loves the bike.
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Sometimes, we’ll learn something about our users. They prefer buttons with drop shadows; they don’t read paragraphs with more than two sentences; they prefer your product on a mobile device; etc. And despite that knowledge, we present things the way we think is best instead of them.
When my wife approached my son in a way he’s comfortable learning (via the TV), he was able to succeed in a matter of minutes where our hours of analog efforts prior had provided only failure.
As designers, we can do a lot to set our users up to succeed. Let’s continue to learn about our users and then remember!
