Why People Don’t Understand How To Use Your Software
By: Olga Kouzina
Tags: User Experience, Product Development, Product Management, UI, UX

*… despite the diligent effort of your UX and Product teams, and what you can do about it.*

The Creator’s Curse

You’ve invested a ton of effort, time, care, and thought into your new software product. You live and breathe, sleep, and wake up with it. You’ve been so thoughtful and caring about your future users, and you’ve performed to the best of your ability (that’s the bottomline, as you’ll see later in the post). You’ve passionately instilled life, creative sparkles, baby unicorns, and what not into the product. But, for some annoying reason, when you’re finally ready to show the beta to your prospects, holding your breath, the sobering response that you get from them is this one: “It’s too complicated. I don’t understand how to use your software”. Sounds familiar?

In this post I will explore possible reasons for such an outcome, offering a few practical strategies that might help to get a favourable first feedback from the users.

Why, Oh Why… ? The Blurred Vision

We honestly believe that UX designers are supposed to take the all-inclusive care of how people experience a software product/a web app. What we forget about is this:

When immersed into a project or an initiative for quite a long time, people blur their sharp edge and their ability to look into what they create with the fresh eyes.

I’ve written on that before in the post called Soap, Laundry and Company Boards. Even with the mix of people from relatively diverse backgrounds in the product design team, if they work on one and the same thing for too long, they lose their freshness of perception which is a vital prerequisite for the quality UX design work and for product management. And, unlike with laundry, you can’t make people and teams “get clean” by rinsing them with instant detergents. The acquired blurriness of perception is inevitable, and it comes as a natural consequence of having the brain focused on one and the same task for too long. Just like with the physical eyesight. If you stare at one spot long enough, you‘d notice how your vision blurs. Or, there’s too much “soap foam” if you rub the laundry against the washboard for too long. Either way, you lose the freshness and clarity of perception. Your vision is blurred.

What makes this “soapiness” even more disorienting, the product dev guys quite often forget that what they do, the software, is not as precious as a commodity. It’s not gold, platinum, or silver. While a piece of a software might have been created with passion and inspiration, and as an insider you know the true value of what you’ve invested into it, it’s hardly possible for non-softdev people to appreciate a piece of software the same way they instantly appreciate the other traditional creative pieces, such as a good music, a good story, a film, or a piece of art. Most “profanes” treat apps as tools that help them do what they need to do faster and with more comfort, and that’s that.

But the blurred vision of inspired product creators keeps playing tricks on them. It keeps telling them that this product screen is very intuitive, and there’s no need for verbal messages whatsoever to explain to people what and how needs to be done here. Or, it tells them that a sophisticated report or a use case, that‘d only be clear to advanced users, is something that any dummy would grab and use, and jump for joy. Not at all. Those biased judgments are costly, as it’s all about time. What if the precious time goes into developing a feature that is rarely used? Or not used at all? Or, what if the lack of just one little thing, one small tooltip, or a quick verbal instruction, or an unclear error message would discourage prospective users from looking into the app/product further, no matter how many treasures are hidden inside? The neglected smooth start is the top reason why prospects silently leave, and might never be coming back.

I’ve mentioned just a few consequences of this blurred vision. If you can’t get a bypass, then which strategies could be used to tackle the blurriness?

UX+Marketing+QA+Developers. Rinse, Mix and Repeat.

First, you need to employ anyone within your reach, just like a toddler plays with anything they can get a hold of in the sandbox. This strategy, even for a toddler, would be less costly and less troublesome than begging with the Mom to buy more shovels, buckets, or — even worse — gadgets. There are people in your company, who are not directly involved with the production, and whose daily job is to communicate with the leads and customers: the customer support. Those folks deserve not only an extra glass of kefir, but rather a monument for what they do, as they are the 911 saviors for any careless “it’s intuitive” assumption of the production team. Ask them first. Or, people in marketing, or in account management — just anyone who’s had enough interactions with the clients/leads/prospects. The marketing/sales folks here would come across as carriers of customers’ perception, and they‘d be delighted to share their feelings about a new interface, or a new product, or a new feature. This strategy is less costly, less risky, and less time-taking than dumping a raw product or feature on the leads, hoping that they‘d be generous enough to even care to communicate their feedback.

You might ask: why not involve the people who interact with the customers somewhat earlier in the stage of UX designing? If these people step in earlier, we‘d be able to come up with the intuitive interface right away..! With no extra rounds of fixing..! Not so fast. There’s a little catch 22 here. Don’t forget about the soap. If the “virgin” marketing/support/sales specialist folks get soaked in the swamps of UX design modeling, they‘d inevitably lose the freshness they need for the job. And they‘d become just as “bubbly” in their perception as the original UX team.