Consumer Product Design UX from a Techie Dad

(Its been more than 3 years since I wrote a post, 1221 days to be precise. The culprit is likely facebook and twitter which help dump a thought in less than 25 words. Let me see how much I can write today!)

A lot of times when we try to develop a product or a feature, our techies tend to start "why can't a user do it this way..", the answer comes only with experience. Once I was reading an article about why do certain things that they do, the answer was simple, because "they can". The same applies to a consumer product, users will do something because they can.

Often there is another way to protest some thing, "aren't user's intelligent to figure this out.. ". Well again, the kids today figure out the tabs and mouse operation as if they were born to operate it. The realization is that they (kids and users) are way too intelligent and will try to do things the way its "natural" or "intuitive".

If a product is not designed inline with "natural" and to handle the stuff that "can" be done, it results in "what did the user do to get here...". This one again is rarely traceable, like when we see our baby climb up or sing a made up song, we have no way to trace back. The product needs to be designed to be simple and a single way to get to a point.

... and the real UX is to predict and design accordingly.