Design Irony & The ‘Smart User’

In the last blog I was mentioning about ‘Design Irony’ with design gap of wordpress spell check engine as the case. I was playing around with this scenario in my mind and was analyzing the circumstances that could have brought this up. I would like share my analysis on this:

A company or team is formed with the motive of creating one of the best blog platforms. The task is daunting. Imagine creating a platform where some half a million users post their thoughts. When building such a complicated system, the team would be busy focusing on the business aspects, technology aspects, usability aspects, wow features etc.

Team has definitely worked hard; the statistics and user base speak for themselves.

However at the end of the day a user has found a gap in the screen which he/she views and uses the most. Is ‘blog’ being pointed out as a wrong word by the spell check engine a real showstopper? Of course not!

The specific observation that I would like to bring about is at the end of the day the end user caught the flaw and there is some change in perception about wordpress. It can’t be quantified. But there is a change.

What in the good work and dynamics of wordpress missed this? Why do so many ‘over the web’ and ‘physical world’ organizations end up in this situation?

The team at wordpress, like any other team in the zillions of organizations around the world, was dead focused on the getting the task done. So deep into the hole that making sure that spell check is on dot (and many other things which are yet to be caught) is the least of ‘least priorities’.

The end user however is absolutely defocused and doing what he is supposed to do. Not much effort needed from the user. His space (interpret it as the scope of regular things he does in wordpress) is pretty clean and serene, relative to what the team in wordpress had to live in.

So how can organizations make sure that they can catch such trivial things which are quite something to the end user or consumer?

They could have probably caught this if they had put themselves better into shoes of user. What is the psychology of the end user? What little nig – nags would get the attention and how can the team catch that? Is this feature really important? Where does the eye of the user go?

Such nig nags go beyond the obvious usability considerations, which the organizations do focus on.

Organizations can consider going to Smart User.

I would define ‘Smart User’ as a loyal user of organization’s services who is devilish and scouting on gaps in details. He/She is an evangelist of the service rendered and is very keen to ensure that the service quality is nothing less than excellent and as a consequence make sure that the organization rendering the service is nothing less than excellent in the marketplace.

‘Smart User’ usually doesn’t expect any rewards for his/her efforts in championing the service. However a responsible organization, which never compromises on any details should reward and encourage such users. I would ideally expect this to go beyond the regular gifts that are a part of any focus group study. The model should encourage every user to become a smart user and the onus is on the organization to develop quality metrics to ensure that there isn’t any dilution in the Smart User base.

The process doesn’t stop there. Organization needs to ensure that feedback from ‘Smart Users’, after qualifying them, should be tightly stitched with the research and development team or the core team responsible for wysiwyg. This is so critical, that without such an organizational operation model, the smart user’s efforts go waste; for a true smart user would be more interested in seeing a perceivable change or understanding the reasons for it not being changed as against being happy with the rewards he/she got. Organizational roles, responsibilities and rewards should be tied to this as well so that no employee at any given point of time fails to recognize the value of smart users.

We are well aware that several companies of the internet age use Smart Users. Google started off by select invitations to Gmail and since then have followed the approach. They expand the user base as the offering gets clean. So do many software companies with their Beta releases. The Apple Safari browser is a great example of the beta release mechanism with its integrated tool for logging bugs. However the majority of observations here are not about the Over the Web organizations but about the several thousand organizations that interact with customers in the physical world. 

Is there a way an organization can fix some of the trivial details before it’s opened to the user base? I could think of only one solution: Develop the art of focusing and Defocusing. Just like a sculptor chiseling the stone at close proximity. After every few chisels sculptor quickly taking two steps back and stares at the evolving sculpture; Just putting on the shoes of the million people who might look at it.

 

This is not something easy to develop. Each and every employee at all levels – from the levels of researcher, developer to Director, CEO must consciously develop the ability to: 

 Focus, defocus and refocus at will