On many occasions I became irritated as the user of a product when noticing that the product was designed to be smarter than me. - Just have a look at many software products we are using in daily life, or at user interfaces from coffee machines, or at text completion on a smartphone, ...
Now, these days I bumped into this funny video about testing the sophisticated design of a children's play. I feel so sorry for the designer. It must be so painful for her (yes, it's an actor, but having been in the role of designers, testers, and end users, I have seen this situation many times).
It's funny to watch this scene, but imagine the scene while designing the play!
The designer get's all these fancy, and sophisticated requirements and use cases from some innovator, a product manager, or just from potential customers of the product. The tell him thousands of things what feature the product needs to exhibit.
In development, engineers think about these requirements about features and ask themselves, what problem the end user is going to solve with the solution. - Confusion arrises.
Often - I have seen this so many times - a dialog between designers and product managers evolves.
- Engineer: "what do you want to achieve with these elements of different form and shape"
- Product marketeer: "don't ask questions, just implement it - that's what you are paid for. Otherwise I can not sell that product."
- Engineer: "but it does not make sense - can we talk to some end customers"
- Product manager: "just do it! You are jeopardising my bonus payments!"
- ...
And so on, until the engineer does what he is asked for at the level of features. That's what he is paid for.
The result: yes, we know it!
- End user: "what the f... these stupid designers and engineers, have they ever been talking to a potential user?"
The moral of the story - you do know all of these books about user centric design, about lean business build up, about most uncertain assumption testing, ...!
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