93 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
93 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Pablo here</title>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta viewport="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<main>
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<h1>
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Hi, Pablo here
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</h1>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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<hr>
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<section>
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<h2>Your customers don't care that your bathroom is dirty</h2>
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<p>The other night I went out with the missus and we went to a fancy pants restaurants, which is unusual for
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us. We prefer neighbourhood, simple places.</p>
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<p>
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During the dinner, she went to the bathroom and came back horrified: "God, their bathroom is fucking
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disgusting". "Much worse than the usual one?", I asked. And she said: "No, but I would expect an upscale
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place like this to have it squeaky clean".
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</p>
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<p>
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I then laid down my thesis on why all restaurant bathrooms, even in really posh places, are always
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terrible: "They don't care because you don't really care". "I do care!", she hit me back. "No, you
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don't. You think you do: you obviously don't like it, and you would love to see it clean instead of all
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filthy. But the truth is, when next month you're thinking about where to go out for dinner, you'll judge
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this place and remember the meal, the waiters, how you felt. But not the bathroom. What was the last
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time you discarded a restaurant because the bathroom was gross". At this point she agreed, and quickly
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drew her attention to the desserts menu. Sometimes I invest too much energy and talk in things people
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find boring.
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</p>
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<h2>The bathrooms of products</h2>
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<p>
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There are a couple of things we can learn here.
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</p>
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<p>
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Your product surely has <em>bathrooms</em>. Those little corners that are not the main course, and
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your customers don't care about much. You need them. Not having them would be problematic. I don't fuss
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over a dirty bathroom in a restaurant, but I'm pretty confident I would remember a restaurant not having
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a bathroom at all if it was responsible for some desperate run-for-it trip in search of a place to drop
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my bombs.
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</p>
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<p>
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Your product's bathrooms are those secondary features your customers kind of need, but don't care much
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about. It's that export to CSV button. Your customer John needs it to push the data into his accounting
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books. The formats of the date columns are weird, and the columns names are confusing, and the fact that
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you send a link to his email to download it instead of just triggering a download in his browser the
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moment he hits the button, make it all quite cumbersome. But, all in all, it's minor pain. The moment he
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uploads it into the accounting software, he forgets about it.
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</p>
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<p>
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I think it's important to be aware of what those are in your product, so you can prioritise accordingly
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and avoid some feature-prioritisation bike shedding. Theoretically, it should be obvious, because you
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know what's important (right? Right?!?), and whatever is not important, is probably not important. But
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then somehow I still see mistakes made around this type of feature.
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</p>
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<p>
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I recently had a conversation with my company's CTO about a situation like this. I had some frustration
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to vent. We had invested so much time and effort in improving the UI of one of our applications. And it
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was so pointless. "There's a good chunk of our customer base that pretty much never go into this UI", I
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told him. "They only contact us through a form when they need the service they hired. I don't think they
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care about this, and I don't think the nicer UI is going to bring any value to them, nor any money to
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us".
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</p>
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<p>
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That UI has to be there. It's where they check some settings. Reset their password. The boring stuff.
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But having achieved being functional, there isn't much more value to provide in improving it.
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</p>
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<p>
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I think it's important to identify which are your bathrooms and make sure you act accordingly. I find
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it's not enough to only care about making the important stuff top priority: it helps to also make it
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clear what's not important, and be explicit about it being low priority. Just like when I define the
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scope for something, I like to both think in terms of what are we including, and also making a explicit
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list of what we are NOT including for the sake of clarity. Theoretically, just listing the positive list
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should be enough. In reality, my experience tells me making the negative helps a lot.
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</p>
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<p>
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So, what are your bathrooms? Are you cleaning them with a toothbrush? Or you have them nice and dirty?
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</p>
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<hr>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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</section>
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</main>
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</body>
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</html>
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