Explaining Product Design to My Parents With Tupperwares
By: Magda Pereira
Tags: User Experience, Programming, Parents, UX, Product Design

Getting my first job was a big thing for me. I finished my studies, and I had real work to do. I instantly became a grown-up! All the troubles of being a student were over, but soon I started facing others that I didn’t even know existed. Nothing prepared me for that one scary question: what do you do for a living?

I started working as a project manager at a consultant company. Sounds simple enough, right? My friends thought so, too. It wasn’t hard to explain my job to them. But it was a whole different story when it was my family asking the question.

When my parents first asked, my explanation was a literal word by word description. Their reaction was something like: “Our daughter is doing very important things.” They seemed happy, but still had no idea what I was doing at work. They just assumed it was important because I had to wear a suit every day.

Eventually, I gave up and ended up with the generic approach: “I work with computers.” Computers were a familiar artifact to them, so they could easily understand, and the problem was solved. Success!

From Project Manager to OutSystems Developer

A year after starting, I left my consultancy days and my suit behind and moved to OutSystems to embrace a new role. If you ask my parents where I work, they’ll say something like “autosystems”, “hotsystems”, “otosystem” or any other creative, but incorrect name. But we have to pick our battles wisely, and this one wasn’t for me.

However, I had to go through the trial of explaining what I was doing again. I was a developer, an OutSystems developer. This was surprisingly easy to get across.

My father likes cars and knows that they can be programmed. So, for him, I was a programmer that eventually would be able to deal with his car. As for my mother, programming was also a familiar word to her. She wouldn’t be able to say exactly what it was, but she could proudly tell people what I was doing.

Explaining it to my grandparents was a much harder task to accomplish, and after a few tries, I gave up. If you asked my grandma what I was doing, she would very proudly say: “She’s a doctor, she works with computers!” She doesn’t really know what a computer is, but she hears us talking about it and gets that they’re something modern.

Explain Hard Concepts With Simple Things

Some time ago, I moved from development to design and joined the Product Design team at OutSystems. The team’s vision is to deliver a product which users will fall in love at first sight, and keep loving forever, and I was very proud to be part of it. So, my next step was to share the good news and explain what I was doing to make this vision a reality.

When I told my parents, my mom’s first reaction was: “Why don’t you have a role with a Portuguese name? Why does every role have so many words in English?” After my previous experiences, I knew that I needed to use familiar concepts to be successful in my explanations.

So, to explain my product designer role to my mother, I used the kitchen as a metaphor. There were several elements to use as an example. Still, to guarantee success, I used that one thing that all mothers love and that we all one day receive in our trousseau: tupperwares!

Like many others, my mother has a huge drawer full of tupperwares. She loves them so much that when I need to use one, she registers it in a paper and methodologically strikes it through the list when I give it back. However, everyone in the house, even my mom, was at some point struggling to find the right tupperware and its respective lid. When I picked one up, I always ended up calling my mom.

With this unwanted responsibility, my mom decided to try something new. She started by putting the lid in each box and tidying up the drawer with all the covered boxes. However, there wasn’t enough space to organize the tupperwares this way, and she eventually dropped that solution. She needed a different approach to the problem.

She then decided to split the drawer into two sides: one with all the boxes, and another one with all the lids. This simple change turned the tupperware search much more comfortable and saved everyone a lot of time! At first, everyone complained about the change, but when we experienced how much easier it was to find a tupperware, we really appreciated the gesture. And my mom did too, as she stopped being called every time anyone needed a tupperware, which she enjoyed very much!

My mom’s achievement was a perfect example of another reality that she was now one step closer to understanding. My team tries every day to improve usability, ensuring that we deliver the right features to our customers. We deliver value that makes the product easier to use and accelerates users’ in their tasks. It’s very similar to what my mom did for the whole family with her tupperware method!

Providing the Best Tupperwares to Our Users

As we’ve seen, my work is very similar to organizing tupperwares for maximum usability profit. But while that analogy worked for my mother, it may not work for everyone out there. Let me give you a more accurate example.

Recently, I worked with my team on providing AI-powered suggestions in our development environment to accelerate users as they develop their apps with OutSystems. And, at first, our AI-Assisted Development feature was presenting a set of next step suggestions based on actions in nearby toolboxes.

Our most experienced users already knew by heart where those actions were and took minimal benefit from what our feature was presenting. The feature wasn’t delivering what was promised: valuable next step suggestions. We had to organize our tupperware drawer and understand how we could turn this around and really help our users.

We identified which actions were harder to perform manually and focused on presenting those first in our assistant, leaving the most basic suggestions to the end or removing them altogether. We ended up settling for the last solution you can see in the previous image. The feedback was great, and people really started taking the most of it, as intended initially. If you want to know the story of how we’ve crafted the assistant’s experience, be sure to check it here.

This is the whole tupperware drawer story all over again. At first, you put all the tupperwares in the drawer with no particular order. After a few times using it, you start noticing that you’re wasting a lot of time searching for the lids, so you decide to change the way they’re organized. One simple change, and everything becomes immediately easier!

That’s what we do with the OutSystems product. We talk and observe users to collect insights and figure out a few solutions. Then, we validate them with the users and make sure that we’re implementing the right ones for them.

Different Parents, Same Problem

I often hear similar stories from my colleagues and understand that this is a common problem between us. Not everyone is seen as a computer doctor. Still, some parents believe that all we do is play videogames all day, while others suspect that we do some kind of magic to come up with computer things.

Even after I came up with the perfect tupperwares analogy, my parents kept saying that I work with computers and never stopped asking me to fix the printer or update the computer. Because that’s what I do anyway, right?

Parents… What can we do?