Stop designing lazy software
Put in the effort to make your product communicate like a human who is super fantastic at their job.
- They affirm the right words.
- They make you feel comfortable.
- They let you know what to expect.
- They create trust with you through their communication (UX) and body language (Visual Design).
- They know their job (product) and customer (you) so well that they know the questions, hesitations and information that you want to know before you knew you were going to ask the question or feel the hesitation.
- They know because they’ve learned from other customers and they can predict your wants and needs.
This is all relatively simple for human-to-human interactions because we’re afforded the luxury of seeing how the person we’re talking with responds, we get to hear the tone of their voice to learn if they’re comfortable or are hesitating.
Contrasted with designing digital products (software)
We must learn peoples expectations, desires, behaviors, etc by studying them, by talking with them, by getting to know them so that we’re armed with the knowledge to be able to help them do the things they want to be doing as easily as we can make it.
- Telling an engaging, compelling and consistent narrative.
- Subconsciously teaching them how to do the thing.
- Showing them the right message at the right time to answer any question they might have had.
- Being explicitly clear in what clicking that thing does.
The list goes on…
Takeaway
Hopefully this gets your mind thinking about the connection between the incredible number of subconscious decisions we make while having conversations with people in real life, and then using that insight to help you design products that do the thinking for the people using your software, so that they can feel good about doing that thing that they want to be doing.
Fun-ish Note
I’m an advocate of trying new experiments for 30 days to see how my life changes for the better… or sometimes worse. This is one of those experiments.
I started with the intention of writing something everyday, but the thought of that was so overwhelming I could never find the courage to start… So to help me do the thing I’ll be writing on Wednesday and Friday for the next four weeks.
Why this experiment?
- I’ll share things, thoughts, ideas, insights that have helped me, so hopefully they’ll help you too.
- Because why not?
p.s. I didn’t proof read any of this so there’s probably a typo or twelve. :)
