Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, look, I think you have to find ways to go... You have to find where you go out of your way to see people using software in real time. I've worked on products that have been used by billions of people. I have friends who have touched billions of people. None of us ever get to see anybody use this stuff in the wild, in their natural state. Maybe we see them in a lab or something like that, but I've never seen anybody just randomly using even Pinterest. But there's ways that you can go and as a creator, as a maker, you can go and watch people using software in the wild. So just go observe people going through self-checkout at Target, which is the best self-checkout I've ever seen. Go watch that, then go watch it at some other grocery store where it's not as great and really notice what happens with people. Much to my kids' frustration when their friends are over, I often grab their friend's phone and just sort of flip through it to try to understand how people are organizing their home screens and which apps they use. And maybe there's something in there that I haven't seen, I'll ask them what that is and ask them to give me a tour of it. I think we're living in a time where people don't do so many usability studies, so a lot of folks get pretty far into their careers without ever having watched mere mortals actually use software. Instead, we're relying on metrics and stuff, which I sort of joked that relying on metrics to understand what's happening at the user level is like looking at raw data from a radio telescope instead of just going out inside and looking at the night sky. You got to find a way to watch the audience. Filmmakers can go to a theater, they can watch people, understand stuff. Comedians can go to a comedy club, they can start to develop an intuition about why people laugh. None of us have an obvious way to go watch people use software, so we don't really understand how humans process what's happening on the screen. And you have to just find ways to do that. And fortunately, software is everywhere. It's not just desktop or mobile software. I mean, there's ATM machines, there's ticketing kiosks, there's point of sale systems everywhere. I mean, go watch somebody over 70 fumble with a chip card insert or watch somebody try to figure out Apple Pay. And these are pretty seamless experiences and still there's cognitive friction in all this stuff. Just go rent a car and notice how long it takes you to figure out what the heck is going on with the dashboard. There's lots of opportunities to try to develop that intuition of how people navigate the human computer interaction, and we need to find ways to do that. An important element of what you're describing here, which I think maybe people miss, is that you're talking about just any software, not your own product, in order to start building your sense of taste and gut feeling for what- Building your sense of taste and gut feeling for what works and doesn't work. And I had a guest on recently, Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, founder of Vercel, and he had a really great phrase of something they do at their company. They have this kind of mission of exposure hours. Increase your exposure hours to people using our product. And then you can extrapolate that to any product. Yeah, well there's using your product, but I always think when you're watching somebody use your product, you come into it with a psychological bias that makes it hard for you to really see what's going on. So there's something about just understanding the audience and how they process information on a screen, not your product. At one point when I was redesigning a checkout system, we did what I called a reality check, which was we held a traditional usability style exercise in a lab and all that sort of stuff, but we had the subjects come through and go through checkout in other products. So we watched them go through eBay and Williams-Sonoma and Amazon or something like that. And we learned a ton about checkout, about what was important to them, how it turns out ship quote is almost as important as price. Things that if we had been watching them use our own product, I'm not sure we would've picked up on, because we would've been sitting there yelling at them to click on the button. Or we would've had a bias and wanting to see the positive things. Whereas, if you just watch people that are using adjacent products could be super useful. And again, we work in a medium, software is a medium, and we need to understand our medium in the same way. Again, musicians go to concerts, filmmakers go to movies, comedians go to comic clubs. When do people like you and I go watch people just use software? Where do we develop that intuition? And unfortunately I think you have to go out of your way to do it.…

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