Product Anthropology

Filed under: User experience

Stop Making Excuses for Not Conducting Product Field Research

I hear it all the time. Because product field research is expensive and time-consuming, most start-ups and smaller businesses can't afford to do it. Yep, it's a common assumption - and completely misguided. The question isn't whether can you afford it. Instead, if your business success hinges on a great product experience, you have to ask if you can afford not to conduct field research.

But hey...we all want to have our cake and eat it, too. The good news is it's possible to conduct time- and cost-effective field research. The key is to be selective in the research scope. We can't afford to spend weeks with users in their natural environments. So we embrace constraints and focus on uncovering just a few critical issues. That's important or else we take the chance of opening ourselves up to that pernicious problem of scope creep.

Now here's the rub: since we're condensing the field research, it's absolutely important to use researchers who know how to perform almost Sherlockian abilities for observation. Remember, we're not just trying to understand how a customer uses a product...we're trying to understand the customer herself. To this point, I like what Kantner and Kiernan write:

Field research is more than usability testing in the field. It is more than learning how someone uses a product. It is learning about the person: how she accomplishes tasks within her own environment, what motivates her to use a product a certain way, and what she naturally does to compensate for what the product does not help her accomplish. This research builds a deeper understanding of the relationship between users' work and their environment, resulting in designs that increase user satisfaction with products. (1)

What does your field research program look like? Does it go deeper than usability testing? What are you doing right now to understand the person who is using your products?

(1) Kantner, L., and Keirnan, T. (2003). Field research in commercial product development, In the Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Conference of the Usability Professionals' Association (2003). Scottsdale, AZ: UPA. [download PDF]

Google Reader SNAFU: What Can We Learn About Our Own Product Management?

After I left Google in July, I heard that there was renewed effort around the project and that a new team was bringing some much-needed attention to the product. I expected them to give the product a facelift, and integrate G+ -- both things that needed to happen.

But killing off functionality that could have easily been built on top of G+, and missing the mark by so much on the UI... and then releasing them under the guise of improvements?

via brianshih.com

I'm not going to pile on Google for how it's managing its products or communicating with its users. Hell, at this point it's almost too easy. But there is one element I think is worth calling out as an example of what not to do with any product: kill - or cripple - functionality without adding equal or increased value *as perceived by the user*.

There's nothing abnormal or wrong about sunsetting product features. In the grand scheme of successfully managing a product, it's necessary to cut things that no longer deliver value to users. If we didn't do that, we'd be wrestling with an unwieldy monstrosity in very short time.

Where Google seemed to miscalculate (or simply not care, depending on who you ask) is when it came to screwing around with features with an almost casual disregard for the end user. Sure it makes sense to begin integrating Reader and other Google properties around G+ but it appears they did it to the detriment of the user's core experience. And with that, they've displayed an arrogance that may end up hurting them in the long-run. Better communication with users would clearly have helped.

And yet, there's a part of me that wonders if we're all not more than a little spoiled as users ourselves. Have we misplaced our own expectations of product perfection? Do we not get a little pissed off when our own users get impatient with our bugs, missing features, delayed launches? 

I don't know...so tell me, is there anything you've learned from Google's Reader SNAFU?
 

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