Make Better Users
As makers, we love tools. Perhaps too much. After all, our customers are not really wanting to use our tool, for them, it’s a means to an end.
We don’t want to use the Uber app - we want to get to our destination safely.
We don’t want to spend time in Quickbooks - we want our accounting done accurately.
We don’t want to decode our camera’s settings - we want that slow-motion waterfall picture.
Yet, in the process of building products, we forget this simple fact. And who could blame us? Making things is hard, and to do it well, you have to obsess over it. The smallest details become your world and these blinders make it hard to zoom out and remember there is something bigger your users are trying to do or become.
This ‘bigger something’ is outside your product, or said another way, your product exists INSIDE this broader context. Kathy Sierra makes this point in her wonderful book, Badass. She reminds us that we don’t want to learn about a camera, we want to become photographers!
Source: Badass, Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra.
While we might need people to understand our product and how it works, we’d all be better off, and so would our users, if we spent as much time contemplating not how to make them better users of our tools, but better at that bigger context our product lives inside - sales, marketing, public speaking, dancing, drawing, and on and on.
Perhaps this is why the ‘best product’ doesn’t always win. The company that makes its users better is the company that wins.