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Excuse 2: Company X Does It This Way
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Oh, we know that will work.
Google/Facebook/Apple does it that way.” This is the worst kind of cargo
cult mentality.
While it’s true that Google, Facebook, and Apple are all very successful
companies, you aren’t solving exactly the same problem that those
companies are, you don’t have exactly the same customers that they do, and
you don’t know if they have tested their designs or even care about design
in that particular area.
You are, hopefully, building an entirely different product, even if it may
have some of the same features or a similar set of users.
Is it OK to get design ideas from successful companies? Of course it is. But
you still need to make sure your solutions work for your customers.
I previously worked with a company that had a social networking product.
Before I joined them, the company decided that, since other companies
had had good luck with showing friend updates, they would implement a
similar feature, alerting users when their friends updated their profiles or
bought products.
Unfortunately, the company’s users weren’t very interested in the updates
feature as it was implemented. When we finally asked them why they
weren’t using the feature, the users told us that they would have been very
interested in receiving an entirely different type of update. This was later
backed up by metrics when we released the new kind of update. Of course,
if the company had connected with users earlier in the process, it would
have rolled the feature out with the right information and gotten a much
more positive reaction on launch.
Another thing to remember is that just because a company is successful and
has a particular feature doesn’t mean it’s that exact feature that makes it
successful. Google has admitted that the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button loses
it page views, but it keeps it because the company, and its customers, like
the feature.
That doesn’t mean it’s a good business plan for your budding search engine
startup to adopt a strategy of providing people with the equivalent of the
“I’m Feeling Lucky” button. In fact, this is a great example of why you
might need to employ multiple testing methods: qualitative testing (usability,
contextual inquiry, surveys) to find out if users find the feature compelling,
and quantitative testing (A/B, analytics) to make sure the feature doesn’t
bankrupt you.
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Part One: Validation
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