Better Product Managers, and Product Management

My husband just unwrapped his brand-new IBM ThinkPad.  As he was turning it over, marveling at how light it is, he noticed one small feature: a hole.

The underside of the keyboard has a hole in it, so that if you spill liquid on the keyboard — and lots of us have done it, we know it happens — it will drain out easily.

Adding a hole was not a feat of technical engineering.  It didn’t require special materials or sophisticated machinery.  It was just a case of someone thinking about what it’s like to knock over your glass of water and curse and turn your laptop upside down banging on the bottom and hoping that the water will leak back out and wondering if a hairdryer will make things worse – and saying, “We know this will happen.  How can we minimize the damage when it does?”

This isn’t the kind of feature that’s going to win you points up front.  But someone is going to be saved by it, and that person is going to be a ThinkPad evangelist for life (or at least the next couple of years, which is pretty equivalent to “life” in the high-tech world).

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Updated: I wrote a comment over at MediaPost and realized that was really the heart of what I wanted to say here.

“Facebook keeps trying to redesign that shell as though IT were the value that users keep returning for. It’s not – users are returning for THEIR friends and photos and updates. You can’t test-drive a data-driven site with fake data. It’s a lot messier to put the real thing out there and let people play with it – but it’s the only hope of getting truly representative feedback.”  (my comment on Listen Up, Marketers: The Focus Group is Dead)

Last week, I previewed the upcoming Facebook redesign, and my first impression was: it looks fine.  Visually, the alignment looked clean – the preview image was easy to scan.  I liked the concept of the invitations over on the left-hand side where they took up less space.  I went so far as to think, good, they’re going to avoid the complaints and unhappiness that their last redesign caused… until I started using it.  It just doesn’t “work”.

The Facebook redesign may have looked fine as a static mockup, but Facebook isn’t a brochure-ware site, it’s data-driven. Without a unique user’s data, it’s just an empty shell.

I’ve heard quite a few people complain that the new design is “ugly”.  I know design is subjective, but respectfully, I say: you’re wrong.

The new Facebook isn’t a visual design problem.  It’s an interaction design problem.  You may not particularly like the bigger fonts or the rounded corners, but if the interaction still worked, you’d hardly notice them.

What does it mean for interaction design to “work”?  It means that the things your website allows users to do aligns with the things your users want to do.  It means that you’ve watched the way users work through a process and you’ve mirrored that process in your application.  This mirroring is usually what people mean when they describe a site or application as “intuitive”.

“Intuitive” isn’t limited to applications, either:

“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”-Neil Campbell, president, Tropicana, North America to The New York Times upon pulling its revamped packaging in February after consumer complaints.

I’m sure Tropicana showed the new branding to plenty of sample consumers.  But did they do it within the interaction of actually buying orange juice?

I’m not a regular juice purchaser, but after reading that NYTimes article, I went to my Safeway and scanned for Tropicana on the shelf.  It took me quite a few seconds to locate it, because the new branding looks like every other orange juice out there.  Think of a distracted mom, with a kid in the cart, trying to quickly grab her family’s favorite orange juice.  Do you want to put obstacles in the path of that task?

The previous Facebook design respected that there were two modes of using the site – quick scan and killing time.  The two views of the News Feed supported these modes: a selective stream of news with a one-click ability to adjust how much/little news you got from an individual, and an unadultered stream of everything your friends were doing in real-time.   The new redesign merged these into a combined page with neither selectivity nor real-time updates.   Now neither group is happy.

It’s easy to dismiss people complaining about Facebook as college kids with too much time on their hands.  Users DO hate change, and sometimes you may need to force it upon them.  But you need to understand how change impacts their interaction with you and your product.  I’ve heard several people say, “wow, I was so productive at work today because the new Facebook just doesn’t interest me anymore.”  Good for their employers.  Bad for Facebook.

Related: Streams, Affordance, Facebook, and Rounding Errors

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An organism needs to invest energy in being beautiful. You won’t see healthy skin on a sick animal, because maintaining a healthy coat is too ‘expensive’. A sick peacock isn’t as spectacular as a healthy one. Or a genetically damaged chimp isn’t going to have as symmetrical a face. As a result, most creatures evolved their definitions of beauty in a mate to match the displays of healthy creatures.  (Seth Godin, Beauty as a Signaling Strategy)

Great argument for why “looking good” has benefits beyond those that can be quantified.  An elegant design or a little bit of flair can rarely be directly connected to a 2% higher utilization or 4% efficiency gain, but it sets a tone, an expected level of values.  It’s the tip of the iceberg: if we care this much about this little detail that you can see, just imagine how much care we put into the massive underlying platform that isn’t immediately visible.

The reverse is true as well: I’ve been mortified during customer demos when a big, obvious, sloppy misalignment or typo was present in our beta application. 

The customer won’t notice, said the engineer who didn’t have time to fix it.

If you can’t spell correctly, how can we trust you to run our business, said the customer.

It’s going to be tempting in this economic climate for companies to cut back on “beauty” – whether that means preserving a page layout by not bombarding it with ads, or taking a few extra seconds to make a customer service call more effective.  But product managers should think about what that says about your overall “health” as a company.  Do you want to look like a wounded animal?  Now is not the time to have a vulnerable-looking product.

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We use Google for our primary office calendaring app.

One of the nice features is that you can share your calendar with everyone in the office, allowing them to see at a glance when you’re free or busy without having to set up an invitation.

Everyone gets their own color.

So you can tell at a glance that the purple blocks on the calendar mean Charley’s booked all day.  Or does it mean Lou is booked all day?

Well, at least your own calendar is a distinctive pink color.  What do you mean, you can’t tell these two colors apart?

At least you’re not red-green colorblind (as approximately 10% of the male population is), because then you’d probably see no distinction between these colors:

These colors are pretty.  Clearly, someone went to some trouble to select colors that harmonize so well.

They just didn’t think of the purpose: color-coding is supposed to help you differentiate at a glance.  Differentiation requires obvious, visible contrast.

But it could’ve been worse – these colors could’ve been used in a pie chart!  That happened with a customer of mine a few years ago.  Their designer just didn’t understand why I didn’t think the all-shades-of-light-green pie chart was a good idea…

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