Teaching My Grandma To Use The Kindle App Gave Great Insight Into Product Design

I recently helped my Grandma with the purchase of a tablet for the main intent of reading.

She wanted to buy a tablet (not a Kindle, as she wanted to also take pictures and check her email on one device) primarily to read books, as her eyesight is not as good as it used to be, and she didn’t like to hold up a magnifying glass to read.

I got the basics of the Amazon Kindle app set up for her.

I got her account set up, and credit card information ready to go. I could have told her step by step how to do everything, but I decided to do something different. Once we ended up at the home screen, I handed her the tablet and said “Ok, let’s go access the store”.

For reference, here is how the home page looks for the Amazon Kindle app.

She took a look around, saw best sellers was at the bottom, but knew that was not what she wanted. She looked at the top left, and then the upper right, where the shopping cart icon is. She took a look at the cart for a few seconds, and then said the following:

I’m not sure if this is the one I want to click. I’m not sure if that’s a shopping cart…it looks like a baby stroller.

That gave me a bit of a pause, to say the least.

Looking at the icon (which you can see in the previous image in the top right corner). Can you see how it could be mistaken for a baby stroller? Compare it to the following shopping cart image:

This is the far more obvious shopping cart. I never, EVER would have obtained that knowledge had I simply showed her right away how to access the store.

I told her to see what happens if she selects the cart.

From there, we ended up at the Kindle store, and she was able to easily search for the book that she wanted to buy. Upon buying the book, we opened up the book.

Ok, I ask, how do we go back to the home page?

After a bit of thought, and some trial and error, we are back at the home screen. She sees her book that we bought, and we open it up.

The font is small by default, so by instinct, she does the finger stretching motion on the screen to make the font larger. She also starts to flip back and forth through pages, again without prompting.

From here, I get her to do a few more tasks, such as going to page 323, go to the beginning of the book, and go to chapter 3. With a hands off approach, she figures out how to do this with a bit of trial and error. As we’re doing this, I notice how many little tweaks could be made to the app to make it a better user experience.

Everything seemed to be going quite well, until she brought up one setting by clicking on the page, and bringing up font and alignment options.

She wants to close this box. She sat there. She hit the back button on the tablet, but that just took her back to the home page of the Kindle app. She re-opens it, and hits the home button on the tablet, but that takes her back to the home screen of the tablet. She asks me:

Paul, I don’t see the X to click out of this. Can you show me where it is?

Now, of course to me, it’s second nature to touch on the screen outside of the box to make it disappear. I showed her that’s what she needed to do. She then told me:

Well, that’s silly. Why don’t they put an x to close it?

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

We went over a couple of other things, like buying another book and how to select the other book. Again, with a bit of trial and error, she was able to figure it out.

As it is probably clear by now, I did very little to guide her throughout the process.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

Benjamin Franklin

It could have been very easy for me to tell her exactly what to do, and have her promptly forget it. Instead, I got her to do tasks, and made observations. My reasoning for this?

1. She is going to retain more if she is figuring it out as we go along, as opposed to me flapping my gums on how to do everything.
2. I was able to observe her thought process, and I was able to see a lot of shortcomings of the app.

I feel the Amazon Kindle app is very well designed. However, by getting a user who is not fluent in technology, but has great value of the app (being able to make the text size much larger), I was able to notice many, MANY shortcomings of the app from a design perspective.

Had I just walked through the app with her, I would have missed out on so many of these design shortcomings and how to improve the product experience.

What does this all mean for Product design, user experience, and the Product Manager?

When we are testing new designs, or the user experience with users, it’s very easy to get the results that we WANT to see. We can lead the user along, and instead of watching how they interact with a product with prompting, we lead them along and can miss out on the shortcomings of our design. A couple of times when I was helping out my Grandma I did notice I said some things that lead her along, instead of letting her figure out what to do.

Now, what can be wrong with that? Like leading questions, we get answers that we want to hear. We tell our user what to do, and how to do it, and we get a nice case of ego stroking.

However, what could happen if we get a user to use our product, and instead of leading them along, we ask them to do tasks, sit back, and observe them?We can find out many cases in which our user experience if greatly flawed. It will be easy for us to jump in and tell them what to do. As I mentioned earlier, I caught myself a couple of times doing this when we were using the app. If you’re getting a user to test out your app, it’s so easy to say “Oh, not that”, or “go over here”.

My main point that I want to make with this article is that observing, and getting users to do tasks instead of leading them along brings so much more insight into our products.

I’m not suggesting you develop an app so that Grandma can use it (but having that in mind will help with better design decisions), but by being hands off in the experience with users and observing, you can notice the flaws and difficulties that pop up.

I will now forever see the one shopping cart icon that is solid (not with bars) as a baby stroller.

Before I published this article, I noticed my Kindle app updated. They tweaked the user interface.

I haven’t heard from my Grandma yet, so either:

1. She hasn’t updated her version of it yet.
2. She was able to understand the changed layout.

Guess I’ll find out.

Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on October 31, 2017.