As we sat across the closing table in late April, my realtor and I discussed the joy of home repairs. Brant and I had managed to snag a great house painter to put some color on the walls of our new place. But our realtor couldn’t get her trusted handyman to call her back.
That’s when we realized; it was the same guy. He was busy finishing our project, so he wasn’t calling her back. She and I each had a vision, but only one of us had the execution.
We tend to associate the value of a business or a product with the idea behind it, but without sourcing and execution, an idea is worth little.
In one usability study, we were evaluating a multi-part assessment. We learned that users were frustrated because they didn’t know how well they were doing. But because a score couldn’t be calculated until a certain point, our client couldn’t satisfy that request. There was no way to source the answer.
Our job as product teams is not just imagining what users might want. Together, product, design, and engineering must figure out whether we can source the right information. Then, design can figure out how to present it in a useful way.
This is hard work. And it’s a reminder that creativity and imagination go far beyond the color palette and typography of a user interface.
Ask yourself:
What questions are users trying to answer?
What data could we offer to answer those questions?
Where are we going to get that data?
What actions do they need to take once they have the answers?
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