I don’t know how my TV works and I don’t care.

(Seventy years ago, I’m sure there were television enthusiasts who cared how they worked.  Indeed, they would have to, because I’m pretty sure television sets in the early 1940s behaved an awful lot like computers in the late 1980s/early 1990s - unpredictable and prone to odd behaviors that corrected themselves when you gave them a solid whack on the side.)

Posterous knows that for most people, they don’t know how file uploading works and they don’t care.  They just want their stuff to be in a place where other people can access their stuff, preferably without having to learn about something they don’t care about.

What’s brilliant about this service is that it capitalizes on the way users were already behaving.

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One of the hardest things for me in my transition from interaction designer to product manager was learning to care less about design.

Should applications look clean and professional?  Absolutely - things like good spacing and a consistent color palette helps you earn credibility with your audience.  Should text be legible and forms readable?  Absolutely again - visual cues must work with the kind of rapid ’scanning’ that web users perform in order to speed processing time and reduce errors.  But beyond a minimum level of competence, design has to be treated like any other competitive advantage.  Will this drive more usage, more customer adoption, nudge my product towards being a de facto standard?

The answer is often “no”.

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Use the Unexpected

Have you ever signed up for a web service and not noticed that it defaulted to a different time zone?

You don’t notice because you don’t expect to have to think about it (especially if, like me, you live on the west coast where most software seems to originate).

Time zone is important for Jajah, whose users live all over the world.

You don’t expect to see numbers on the right-hand side of a signup form.  It catches your attention.

Once you notice the time, it’s easy to glance from it to your system clock.  They match?  Check, you’ve got the right time zone.

Sometimes requiring an extra click helps your design.  Other times, it doesn’t.

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I’m not associated with BrandDoozie in any way, but I know a good solid splash page when I see one.  This site pulls together the core best practices into a good-looking home.  Without the consumer knowing anything about their product, they convey professionality, security, and value.

Let’s look at the elements that lead to the good cohesive experience:

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I started this post writing about some of the ideas I’ve had that I wish would get built, and then I realized I was violating one of my own cardinal rules. Focus on the problem that needs solving, don’t jump to the solution.

It’s hard to maintain that rigorous focus on problems in internal product management meetings, but when talking with customers or consumers, you’ll need to actively walk them backwards from solution to problem. You can do this by simply asking them “Why?” until you get to a problem. (This is one of the ideas from IDEO’s Method Cards.)

So I’ll start with one of my product ideas:

Consumer: I want a “snooze” feature for individual incoming emails so I can choose when I want to read them.

You: Why?

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Step-click. Step-click. Step-click. Step-click. Step-click.

At the top of the steps I paused, and balancing on my crutches for a second, surveyed the Caltrain platform. In front of me was the one crosswalk where pedestrians could cross from one side (trains headed south to San Jose) to the other (trains headed north to San Francisco, which is where I need to go). But which side was which? There was not a sign in sight.

So I started crutch-walking the 200 yards or so to the other end of the platform where people were waiting. I’m pretty good on crutches but it’s still slow-going: step-click, step-click, step-click. I get three-quarters of the way to the other side of the platform and there is a sign: San Jose (Southbound). Oh no!

Now I have the information I need to make my decision - oh, but there’s no crosswalk here, I have to turn around and go back to where I started to cross over. By the time I had navigated back to the crosswalk, crossed to the other side of the platform, and started towards the ticket machines, I had missed my train.

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