Talk to your users

Once, a long time ago, I was at an event where a local 'business leader' came to talk. Their talk was the story of their business, how they grew it and what made it successful. By some metrics their business was a success. It wasn't a tech startup, this is before those really existed where I live. It was a national size business, I'll leave it at that to spare potential harm from this story.

The key takeaway from the talk was 'you should not care one bit about your customers, just care about money'. Now even in the moment I knew that was a stupid thing to say. It did however stick with me. 

The idea that anyone would want to spend their days building something for people they didn't care about is crazy to me. I find it hard to imagine that someone could hate their customers but love money enough to really sit down and listen to what people need. 

I've had a lot of roles in my career. Not all of those roles required me to spend time with users, but I always tried my best to do so anyway. There's a lot of value in cutting out as many layers as you can and spending time face to face with real users. One, because at the end of the day you should want to help them and two, because sometimes you can save yourself a lot of time.

Recently we had a note from sales that a customer needed a new report from the product. Not an unusual request, people want new reports all the time. This particular report was a bit of a pain as it compared data from two areas of the app with no consistent link.

We spent some time designing lightweight versions of the report in google sheets to avoid building too early. Once we had something we liked, we organised a chat with the user.

Within a minute of talking it became obvious that the report wasn't going to work. This isn't a bad thing. It turned out that what the customer needed was a broken down list of charges showing quantity and unit price. Their underlying goal was to compare the unit rates between jobs. Nothing more complex than that.

This change took about an hour.

The report we designed would have enabled the same thing. It had units and unit costs on there. It just would have been a very complicated and developer intensive way to get a small piece of information across.

With a nebulous focus like ‘only care about money’ this feature would have probably been left unsolved forever. The proposed report was complicated and would need a lot of testing. Wanting to know why the customer was asking for the feature helped the team cut out ninety percent of the work and deliver the same outcome. Talk to your users, please.