What My Daughter Taught Me About Product Usability

I’m a fairly new dad — 7 months on the job. My daughter is also a fairly new human — also 7 months on the job. One of the greatest joys I have everyday is watching her curiosity and willingness to explore new objects, textures, sounds, etc. She loves to watch the world around her, and is fascinated by the most simple toys and facial expressions.

Yesterday, watching her play with a set teething rings, I was hit with an epiphany: Users are infants.

Now, let’s pump the brakes on that thought real quick. I’m not trying to be derogatory or demeaning. Like most initial thoughts, that was a very poorly developed idea — essentially just a reaction in the moment. It’s safe to say that practically every software users is infinitely more intelligent and capable than an actual infant. So, I’m going to modify my statement to this: Users are creatures of instinct.

You see, I’m sitting on the floor next to my daughter while she’s playing with these teething rings and I realized just how perfectly these teethers were designed for the intended end-user — in this case, my 7 month old daughter. My daughter did not need to be on-boarded with a variety of guides, messages, and touch points in order to learn how to use these products. Rather, she literally picked them up and stuck them right in her mouth. It was pure instinct for her. That’s when I learned an important lesson in usability: A good product should be a natural extension of the user.

When building products, we as developers or product people tend to want to flex our technical muscle. Not only can we meet the user’s needs, but we’ll solve problems they didn’t even know they had! I see it everyday when talking with various stakeholders at our company. I start talking about a new feature that [in my opinion] is super exciting and our customers should be absolutely amazed! I’m normally met with a blank stare and that person saying, “that’s great and all, but how does that allow them to mass archive contacts?” Often, what I value from a technical perspective tends to be white noise for my stakeholders, and even worse, my customers.

Now, this isn’t some new philosophy. We all know Occam’s Razor. We all understand the concept of a minimum viable product. This should be common practice, right? Yet, go look at the apps, websites, products you use on a daily basis. Very few actually achieve this concept — or at least very few do in my life. Popular apps like Facebook — who has 2 billion users — are very unnatural and complicated once you click past the MVP. As I said earlier, we even struggle with this on our SaaS product. In an attempt to make our customers’ lives easier, we first have to educate them on the product, its features, and the value proposition it offers. There’s little about it that is natural, or instinctive, for a large majority of our users. While our product is very valuable for our customers, there’s a lot we have to overcome initially in order to get long-term buy in from them.

Well-designed products allow users to operate them on instinct, instead of requiring learned behavior.

In his book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal delivers this quote that should be on a Post It note plastered on every product manager’s computer monitor: “products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail.”

Boom. I could probably end on that quote.

The point is, we should be building products in way that allow the user to pick it up with minimal on-boarding. Which brings up a really interesting topic that I’m just going to briefly discuss: Common User Knowledge.

The general concept being that it’s safe to say that almost any user between 18 and death can understand how a toaster functions — Common User Knowledge. However, how many users under the age of 37 (assuming the Millennial generation begins in 1980) can operate a typewriter? A typewriter is not a product that fits within the Common User Knowledge that your average, non-hipster Millennial has. Thus, targeting Millennials as the end-users for your cool, new typewriter product would also require you to dedicate a substantial amount of resources (documentation and personnel) just to educate your customers. This obviously requires time, money, and has a higher attrition rate due to users who either don’t value the product or don’t easily learn how to use it.

My conclusion is simple: Successful products have instinctive usability and require little-to-no product education.

PS: Who would of thought that you could learn something from a baby’s teething ring?

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