The “I Know What the Users Want” Attitude

It is amazing how many people in your organization actually think that they know exactly what people want, and how a product should be designed. I am in no way saying that a user experience expert always knows best how to create a great product; I am just saying that when it comes to the user experience, you will be confronted with a very large number of people who will tell you that they know better.

I usually compare user experience with bringing up a child. Many people have tried bringing up a child once or twice, and hence they feel like experts in child psychology. These people will argue with experts in the area because they feel that they have the same expertise as, say, a teacher, educator, child psychologist, and so forth.

Sales managers typically know a lot about how customers react to a certain product, but do they really know what the users want? They typically know all about what the customers do not want, and also what the users tell them they want. This is very valuable information, but it does not necessarily tell anything about latent needs and what consumers may in reality be looking for.

Salespeople are also rarely innovative. They tend to stick to a solution that a single (important) customer has asked for. They are rarely able to see what a majority of users would want—and being creative is not part of their job description. Of course there are exceptions, and I have seen quite a few. This is not an attempt to blame salespeople (or CEOs for that matter), but rather to say that priorities are often different in different parts of your company.

Likewise, product managers often tend to solely look at what is easily marketable. This is very important, indeed, but product managers may not see underlying needs that can actually create a truly great and cool product. My impression of product managers is that they are really good at focusing on a single function or feature for a product, because they can already see how this feature can be used in marketing campaigns. But product managers often lack the capacity to see the potential if you instead create 20 small user experience improvements to the product. In my experience, 20 small improvements to the user experience of a product may sometimes have a much bigger effect in the market than a single new feature. And these improvements can even be marketed if done right. And it may be your task to explain and rectify this to the product manager.

Engineers and engineering managers typically know what is easy to implement, and hence their minds will often be skewed toward solutions that are easy to implement. This can be challenging to tackle, and you will sometimes need to understand the challenges that they have in finding solutions that are easier to implement but that still give the same user experience.