Stop Telling Me
Last Sunday’s New York Times magazine had an interesting article about the difference between humans and other animals. Michael Tomasello’s article discusses how, IQ-wise, children are about the same as chimpanzees and orangutans. But children do much better on tests that measure social skills. And not because they can talk - it’s because the children share information and share responsibility, whereas the apes communicate only to command others to do what they want.
As usual, I see this as clues to better product design. Many products communicate like apes do: they tell me what to do next. Better to treat me like a person: give me the information I need to understand the job at hand and participate in getting it done.
I’m thinking about medical products designed for resource-poor settings. My company has worked on a couple of such projects over the last few years, and the word from the marketing directors at the client companies is very often “it has to be completely fool-proof” which generally translates into “it’s only a product if there’s one button.” The implication–more than an implication–is that the people ultimately using the devices are not only untrained but unskilled. It’s funny, because we expect aid workers or medical personnel to be driving from village to village on a motorcycle, but we don’t trust them to understand anything about how the equipment we’re providing works. We want to give them a device with a magic “push me” button, and all they need do is push it.
Not only does this underestimate the resourcefulness of people in general (and people in resource-poor settings specifically), but it reduces the relationship between product and consumer to an unsatisfying level. If you’re going to give me a tool, let me use the tool. Take advantage of the fact that users are humans–they want to communicate and take part. Let them!
Are you treating your users like chimps?
