FB and Empathic design

The topic of empathic design has been coming up lately after Facebook’s “The year in review” was revealed and for some it did not have to be a great year. (For reference, click here for algorithmic cruelty)

When we design a product, we always have to choose what we want the customer to experience as a part of using our product. We pick up the persona based on our target end user and design the experience around that. However, there is a good chance that the product experience could also turn out to be different despite all our user research.

User research and experience design

I have been involved in user research in my previous experience as a product manager and it is not easy to infer experience design from user research.

The reasons are many. Based on my experience, I could see a few reasons why

• I picked out a more homogenous set of users for my research. Hence the users validated each other’s points
• I had to build out and release quickly, hence ignoring some of the unlikely scenarios
• The users genuinely did not know how to perceive my product feature

Homogenous set of users

This is the most common mistake that product managers and experience designers do when they start.

When we decide on the target audience and the persona, We have to remember that the only way we can ensure only those segment of users get to use the product is through very controlled distribution.

That is not going to happen. Designing for a wide set of personas is very difficult and lengthy. It is also equally confusing for us to infer patterns out of results if we have a divergent set of personas.

It is always good to be aware of the pattern that we are following in user research and experience design and make sure that we keep an open eye for any user feedback that we get.

We also need to remember to design for accessibility.

Release quickly

This is another big issue that face small product teams. The pressure to release something quickly so that we can get user feedback also means that we constantly have to cut scope of a release. This is painful and is not easy.

The only way to make sure that we are on the right path is to release quickly and as often as possible and watch for any user feedback. It would be great if we have an established alpha / beta customer base that can give us quick feedback on releases before it hits a wider audience base.

The other option that could also help is the ability to do a/b testing. This would help us to understand what works best before releasing it to all the users.

Users genuinely do not know how to perceive my product

As a product manager, this is a golden opportunity for me. This frankly means that the user has not experienced a product like this before and I get a chance to guide the user through the product.

Make sure that there is plenty of product help available and watch out for any feedback that might come out.

The other option that I have as a product manager is to repackage the same feature so that users can relate to it better. Product managers should heavily depend on the copy writing team in case they come across a scenario like this.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the FB “The year in review” is not a product feature that was because of designing for homogenous users. It is a scenario where the users genuinely did not know how to perceive the product during the user research phase. They would perceive it based on the package it. If I had packaged it as a personal newsletter or a Reflecting on last year, it might have been received differently.

The biggest lesson has been that of empathic design. However, a word of caution. Empathic design needs more inputs than user interviews , focus groups and other traditional techniques. Some of the techniques that we used when we had to use when we designed a product with similar challenges was ethnography. Ethnography, while challenging, will help us arrive at interesting inferences.