Assuming the worst in product design
Last week I took part in Wamda MEMakers GE Venture Sprint, which brought some startups with executives from GE for a full day. I won’t go into details, I’m sure the folks at Wamda are compiling a post about the event as we speak.
Part of the agenda was a design thinking exercise and my team’s challenge was to make people walk more. As we started going through our different ideas/conclusions from user interviews and trying to define the main themes we ended up with:
- Necessity: going to work, walking the dog
- Incentive: health benefits
- Environmental: the weather, where you live or even urban design
As we debated our solution and which themes to build on, I noticed myself advocating for necessity above all and arguing that in our increasingly busy lives and continuously shifting priorities, incentives will never do as good of a job as necessity.
And as I’ve come to reflect on that day and this particular episode, it dawned on me that my insistence on the necessity theme arises from my deep conviction of assuming the worst out of users/people.
Meaning I assume that users won’t be motivated by incentives, they won’t read/understand the app intro or tooltips, they’ll skip your video, barely spend any time on the site, they’ll quit the account setup half way through, and so on… you get the gist.
By “won’t” I surely don’t mean never, but more often than not they will fail to do what we expect of them.
People are getting ever busier at work, and if they want to waste time and have fun they have dozens of familiar venues to do so (Facebook, Instagram, games, etc.), getting to engage, learn and use your product doesn’t even register on the interest scale. The odds are overwhelmingly against you.
I’m probably exaggerating here, and a decent percentage of users actually do give new products the chance they deserve but it doesn’t hurt to assume the worst, does it?
