The world of UX has a phrase: “you are not the customer”, which basically highlights the fact that you should be aware that people may use your products in different ways than you intended.
I think I can add on to this by saying, even if you were the customer, you still wouldn’t know what you want.
I had a phase in which I was interested in Chatbots, and developed one (A personal Jarvis if you will) that I still frequently use. But a lot of how I use it is different from the way I intended. My relationship with Bette (the chatbot) has evolved over the years, with new feature additions and feature rewrites for its one and only one customer, me. At this point she’s more of a Frankenstein monster than the elegant application I had initially envisioned. But in this diversion from excellence, she more accurately fits into my workflows and ways of doing things.
One specific example would be saving images. Because it’s basically a chat application, I implemented a feature whereby all images I send to it in chat get saved to a specific folder on my personal server. Handy for important receipts, documents or other pics I think are important. Great idea right?
But over time, I noticed that I use this feature primarily as a way to transfer images from my phone to my laptop, like most people do with whatsapp. And most of these images are not important in the long run: Memes, screenshots for tests i’m doing etc.
Planned Use: Save important images to server
Real Use: Transfer images from phone to laptop and vice-versa
Unintended Consequence: Lots of images on my server I have no long term interest in.
I subsequently changed the implementation to only save the images I explicitly tell it to save.
If I was so wrong about a feature I came up with for myself, how badly am I anticipating the needs of users of other products? 😀 This brings me to the conclusion that only real world usage can tell you the truth about an idea.
Unfortunately you have to make something in order to test it. You can’t test nothing. So some initial planning is still required. But I suggest you hold on to your theories loosely, until they have had a chance to experience the wrath, change or celebration of real customers.
How are people really using your products? Can you optimize / pivot for that? The results might surprise you.
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Real World Usage
