Rethinking the Digital Opportunity
I’ve worked in tech my entire career. My hobbies involve tech, my reading involves tech, my side projects are all tech-related…it’s fair to say my life consists of family, tech, and food. Due to this, I’ve had a hard time seeing the world through any perspective other than my tech-colored glasses. About a year ago, my mother moved in with me and flipped my understanding of the world upside down.
She’d never used a smart phone.
She’d never conducted a Google search.
She’s never played an online game.
She’d never seen Facebook.
She’s STILL never typed on a keyboard.
It was 2016, and I was teaching a 50-something how to use the same technology I’ve taken for granted my entire career. What a wake up call.
“Just Tap the Button”
As soon as Mom moved in, I gifted her my spare Nexus 6 Android phone. The first several weeks with the phone, I noticed something that shocked me: Mom was afraid of the phone. Specifically, she was afraid of, “Messing it up.” When she tapped something for the first time, and the screen changed, she was constantly concerned that she broke it. When turning the phone changed the orientation, she kept rotating the phone because she thought she broke it. The first time she received a call, she had no idea how to actually answer it.
After a few weeks, I realized one of the biggest lessons of my career: All my knowledge, all my experiences, all my design expertise assumes my user has taken a similar technological journey as I have. Here’s a simple example:
Here’s a screenshot of a standard “Contacts” app for an Android device. My mother is old-fashioned, she still knows phone numbers and likes to dial them directly. She asks me where the numbers are. My response? “Just tap the dial button.”
Look at this image. You might say, “How will she know which icon means Dial?” That’s a great question, but it’s not the response I got. Instead, I was told, “There aren’t any buttons on this screen.”
Unless you’ve evolved with design patterns, you’ve no reason to know that the icons are tappable. In fact, the only thing on this screen my mom thought she could click on were the profile photos of the contacts.
I used to repeatedly tell her that the technology was there to make her life easier, but the more I watched her use, and the more frustrated I got with app design in trying to explain things to her, the more I realized just how intimidating and scary these things can be.
Needless to say, we’ve spent many hours chatting about how to use the phone and the different apps. Also, if you know anybody from the Suntrust mobile app team, please tell them to hire me to fix the crummy design of their app. Anyway…one year after introducing my mother to smartphones, it’s now an indispensable part of her life. We’ve converted her!
The Opportunity She Sees
Ok, so we’ve established that my mom was starting from ground zero in her tech journey. Sometime in the past year, she stumbled upon Pinterest. My mom’s always been crafty. If you had the pleasure of making her Christmas list, you’ve been gifted stuffed rabbits, handmade Christmas ornaments, custom-designed wreaths, and a myriad of other crafts and doodads she’s created throughout the years. Pinterest just fueled her creative fire. There were two other important developments:
- My sister had a baby (now a toddler), making my mom a grandma. Something magical happened when she became “Gramma”
- My parents divorced, causing Mom to leave Missouri to live with me. She needed to keep her mind occupied, which means keeping her hands occupied.
Pinterest + Grandchild + The Need to Be Busy = A mountain of Baby Blankets in my basement.
What started as a simple hobby on her sewing machine quickly expanded to an uncontrollable obsession. Blankets of all shapes and sizes gave way to burp cloths and teething rings. We made a few posts on Facebook that resulted in sales to family and friends. Those sales resulted in a confidence boost that sparked her first craft fair, pictured in the header.
While the craft fair was a total bust (it was a Wine Walk, so folks weren’t interested unless your booth had some alcohol), we now had a ton of blankets that needed to get sold. Here’s the beautiful question my mom asked: “Can I sell my blankets on the internet?” In less than a year, my mom went from never using the internet to wanting to open her own shop.
Don’t Take the Tech for Granted
I’ve become accustomed to looking at web apps as just that, apps. For many apps out there, I’m not the target user, so the magic doesn’t hit me like it does other. Etsy is a great example of this. I’m not a crafter-creative-type, so the value prop of having a whole wide world to sell my creations doesn’t light my world on fire. For my mother, however, this is mind-blowing. She can sell a baby blanket to anybody, anywhere, for a negligible amount of added effort.
As a software developer, this is the reaction I want from my target users. I want to be able to deliver that feeling of possibility, of magic, of a new world of opportunities. It’s easy, far too easy, to get sucked in the trap of cynical development, but I always have my mom to look to as a living example of the wonder of this industry I call home.
If you’re interested in checking out her stuff, view her Etsy page at https://www.etsy.com/shop/BabyByMada or her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/frombabybymada/. If you want to learn more about building products people love, finding that magical value proposition, or just want to chat with me, hit me up on LinkedIn, leave a comment on this post, or email me at andrew@betterproduct.co
