short deck on understanding product uses for UX

1. understanding product uses
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2. understanding product uses
what?
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3. what is this for?
what does it do?
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4. ok, that’s what the designer says
what about the users?
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5. to Google!
can we see how people use it?
can we see what emotions it evokes?
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6. to Google!
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7. ...huh
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8. whoa!
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9. so what does this product ACTUALLY do?
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10. so what does this product ACTUALLY do?
functionally, it
-allows you to save pages to be read later
- saves pages in a nice, easy to read layout
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11. so what does this product ACTUALLY do?
emotionally, it
- fulfills a need to be on top of things
- a need to not lose interesting things
- a need to defer decision-making and save focus
- for some users the core technical function of ‘saving’ isn’t used or
even required!
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12. so what does this product ACTUALLY do?
This allows us an insight into the true function of this tool:
It allows users to triage information, to reduce cognitive load,
to manage attention, to defer decision-making to another time
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13. this approach holds true for many apps and tools
attention management
workflow triage
(not email processing)
(not content creation)
answers
(not search)
expectation management
(not trip planning)
writing
(not typesetting)
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14. so what is this good for?
- Genuinely new products are very rare. Competitor research is
important to understand the market and the problem a product solves.
!
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15. so what is this good for?
- You can determine who your competitors ARE. Instapaper’s obvious
competitors are Pocket and Readability, but also attention
management tools such as Freedom and Isolator.
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16. so what is this good for?
- You can do this with a product of your own to determine feature
development. ‘Attention management tool’ is a different feature set to
‘article saver’.
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17. so what is this good for?
- Bloated products like Word and Photoshop are already being
undercut by simpler products that address the core need better (like IA
Writer, Scrivener, Sketch and Pixelmator)
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18. takeaways
- PEOPLE ARE NOT (ONLY) RATIONAL - products fill emotional needs
as well as utilitarian functions.
- PEOPLE WILL BEND PRODUCTS TO DO WHAT THEY NEED companies often buy products for business reasons that don’t always
align with actual use. Idiosyncratic uses are important, pay attention.
- THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USE FOR THINGS - products may fulfill
a need that you never expected.
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