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Always listen to your users. Don't always do what they ask. When I took a course on software usability many years ago the first principle was how to work from
by wheels 18y ago
Always listen to your users. Don't always do what they ask.
When I took a course on software usability many years ago the first principle was how to work from what a user asked for to what they wanted to do. So, a user might say, "Can I have a checkbox to turn off feature Y?" What that meant was, "The way feature Y is implemented annoys me." And the solution is often to rethink feature Y and what it's supposed to do.
- jacobbijani 18y agoExactly. Henry Ford heard "I want a faster horse" but gave people an automobile. Because he heard "I want to go faster."
- wheels 18y agoTo be clear, Henry Ford was a great innovator in production and assembly techniques, but Karl Benz created the first automobile 23 years before the Model T. I suspect what Ford heard was, "I want an automobile." He figured out how to do that cheaply and on a large scale.
- DabAsteroid 18y agoKarl Benz created the first automobile The first automobile was created before Karl Benz was born. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile Benz created the first production automobile in 1888, 3 years after his (and, respectively, Daimler's and Maybach's) first automobile, and 20 years before the first production Model T was built at the Piquette Plant on September 27, 1908.
- jacobbijani 18y agooh my god, you guys. way to miss the point.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoNo, stop. It is important to be able to object precisely and factually. It is trivial to look up information, and leaving misinformation in a comment because you can't be bothered to check the Wikipedia articel is as jarring as that typo I didn't bother to correct a few words ago.
- DabAsteroid 18y agoI don't disagree with the statement that Henry Ford gave the public the automobile (instead of merely a better horse). I agree with your analogy (as long as "faster" can be replaced with "better" -- since horse-based transport had other problems besides merely being slow). My understanding is that all other efforts, around that time, toward automobile production fucused on charging as much as possible per unit, and limiting production toward that end. Even Ford's early investors felt that that was the only profitable way forward, and he had to fight to get them to agree to do the opposite -- minimize price and maximize production. Henry Ford, more than any other individual, replaced America's, and the world's, horses with the automobile. (I use Ford's 1922 book My Life and Work as reference for these statements. http://www.google.com/search?q=ford+my+life+and+work http://www.google.com/search?q=ford+my+life+and+work) . And while we are on the subject of analogies, we might mention Sony which, in 1983, instead of giving the world a better analog phonograph player, gave the world the Compact Disc player.
- bbgm 18y agoSo true. Probably the first lesson I learnt as a product manager was how to take what users asked for in terms of features and then try and understand "why" they wanted it. Especially useful when you listen to a number of feature requests and try and distill them down to the reasons underlying them. Many disparate ones can often be coalesced down to a few actual requirements/issues which you can then try and address instead of just implementing features