What Spending Time With Grandparents Taught Me About Product Management

Every Product Manager needs to talk to the older generation, whether parents or grandparents, that are not as fluent with technology, and listen to them.

There are plenty of lessons to learn on product design and product management.

With one Grandma, she is always confused with the internet and smartphones when they come up in conversation. Here are some things she has asked:

• So you can watch television programs (I find it adorable how she calls television shows programs) on your phone?
• So you can do THAT with your phone? So you kids are not just sending text messages to one another?
• So on YouTube, what time can you watch those videos at? How do you check the schedule?

I try to give a high level explanation of how these things work to her, but I always struggle and end up giving up. My mom, bless her, tries her best, but that seems to cause more confusion.

With my other Grandma, a recent talk about the Amazon Kindle was also enlightening on product design and complexity.

Her eyesight is not as good as it used to be, and she doesn’t like to hold a magnifying glass up to read, so I recommended to her to buy an Amazon Kindle. I had my Kindle with me that day, so I showed her how it worked, and while it is very simple for me to use, she was struggling with it. I also had my laptop opened up to the Kindle product page on the Amazon store to show her the models available and pricing. She asked me if I had my laptop open to the Kindle page so I could send books to my Kindle. It took me a moment to process the question, and I realized I was just causing greater levels of confusion.

One time on the bus, a man in his 60s was struggling with using Facebook on his phone and asked me for help.

He was struggling with logging in and getting an email confirmation to confirm his account, but he was trying to log in on Chrome, despite the fact he was already logged into the Facebook app. He was confused about the differences between the two, and was also confused by the messenger app. Again, I got him in the right direction, but struggled to give a good explanation of what went wrong without causing more confusion.

I’m sure we have all helped someone with technology that is a mystery for them, while for us, is second nature.

You may have seen the Grandma Discovers the Internet Meme before. Source: Quickmeme

No, this post is not about picking on Grandma or older people with their struggles with technology.

I’m using it as example to emphasize a growing issue of growing complexity of products, or making assumptions about how tech savvy users can be. What seems so obvious to us in how to use a product, may very well not be the case for the user. When they don’t understand, it’s easy for us to blame them for being tech illiterate and that it’s not our fault that they can’t understand the product.

So, on that note what can we learn about Product Management from Grandma in how we build out products?

A picture tells a thousand a words, so let’s look at a few images that do a fantastic job of explaining the gap that came occur between the developers and the users.

Source: Justpost

I’m sure we all know at least one developer who viewed user intelligence at the equivalent of cavemen.

Source: Coding Horror

I love the panel on the overestimation of target users. It’s so easy for developers or a product team to make these assumptions on users, thinking that because it makes sense to the product development team, it will automatically make sense to the user.

Finally, here’s a gif that I came across titled — As a software developer, this is how we view ALL end users.

Don’t lie, you’ve thought of users like this at some point in your career.

As a Product Manager, you can play a large role to help reduce the disconnect between the end users and those developing the product.

A concern that has popped into my mind lately in regards to tech literacy:

• People at younger ages are becoming more tech literate.
• As a result, we can begin to ask more of the user. We can build more complex products, or use it as an excuse to build more complex products, and forego building intuitive simple products with good design principles.

As a result of this, I see two great concerns:

1. We end up building more complex products that avoid good design principles and that can one day turn into a monster of bad product design. We end up with products that nobody wants to use.
2. As a result of building more complex products, it’s easy to alienate potential users who are not as tech literate.

So, keep these ideas in mind when you’re talking with users, and building products.

Now of course, depending on your target user, you can get away with building more complex products. For example, a product like JIRA, most of the users are going to be software developers, and you can put good design principles on the backburner and up the complexity, as they don’t mind it, and create a more powerful product.

However, if your target user for your product is Debbie in accounting, 57 years old, has only been on the internet for 10 years, and looks at the keyboard while she types, you’re going to need to figure out how to build a product that makes sense for people like Debbie, and not for the developers or the product people designing them. Debbie doesn’t want a product like JIRA.

The iPhone is to me an example of a product that was well designed with the user experience of many in mind.

I do also think that the rise of mobile has lead to better design practices, as building the user experience for a product on an iPhone has far more constraints than building a user experience for a product on a desktop, where developers and product teams need to get creative to solve these problems.

Of course, this is not always the case.

I’m sure we’ve all worked on a product that had a big gap in what the development team expected of users, and who the users actually were.

I have. You end up with bloated products with more and more menus and checkboxes, and end up with solutions that are band aids to the bullet wound.

You can have two ideas in mind going forward.

1. You build products with the idea in mind that people are becoming more used to technology, and you can expect more from users. You can then sadly fall into the trap of building complex products that eschew good design principles and let the user figure it out.
2. You build prodcuts with othe users in mind, you don’t overestimate the user, and instead of piling on more complex solutions like the above, you build products that solve problems, and that anyone can use to solve.

You can begin to build products that Grandma can easily understand.

So, the next time you have someone asking you for technology help, instead of rolling your eyes at things that seem to obvious to you, listen to them. Understand what they’re trying to do.

Source: Funnyjunk

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Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on October 7, 2017.