Two Weeks in Product Matters: Teams, Election Thoughts, and Milton Glaser
Every week we round up products and articles that have piqued our interest.
This entry is for the two weeks ending November 11th and the 18th. The U.S. election outcome affected Product Matter’s publishing schedule, but regular updates return this week.
“Only Microsoft could make Teams”
Pramit Nairi gives Microsoft’s new Slack competitor, Teams, a spin around the block. He comes away mostly unimpressed, but what stood out to me in his review was this line:
While there are many things Microsoft has done right and arguably functionally superior, creating software that makes people feel good when used is certainly not one of them.
A core principle that Product Matters aims to get across to product designers and developers all around is the conviction that products don’t exist in a vacuum; that your design decisions can affect the user’s mental state, and that poor decisions will affect them negatively. There is perhaps no greater example of this notion than Microsoft’s software history: for decades, Apple differentiated Mac OS X to Microsoft’s Windows by saying that software should “just work”. That using a Mac wasn’t just functionally better or more efficient, but also emotionally better. Be it implicitly or explicitly, Apple’s marketing routinely suggested (or reminded) that using a Windows PC was a painful and frustrating experience, whilst using a Mac was a breeze and a delight.
Steve Jobs explained it as “the only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.” But whether you call it taste, or “soul”, or the passion poured into a product, the vision driving the product design should be conscious of the end user’s emotional experience. How does this product impact users emotionally? Do they feel happy and confident when they use it, or do they feel frustrated, or sad, or worse? Or, as Nairi posited: does the product make users feel good when used?
Microsoft’s software dominance over the past 30 years has enabled hundreds of millions of users the world over to feel empowered; to be enriched with information, knowledge and possibilities. There is great value in that, and great joy it has brought. But to this day, Microsoft’s software remains widely known as the more frustrating option; a result from design-by-committee where everybody gets their say but nobody is truly happy.
(Aside: my every use of Windows 10 continues to provide a torrent of frustration, but it still is a marked improvement over previous releases, and one which a majority of users enjoys.)
John Gruber has described this as the Auteur Theory of Design: the idea that one person’s strong vision can drive a product to greatness, provided that vision is not encumbered along the way by too many additional cooks in the kitchen. It can be a strong team of people who are aligned very closely in their vision and understanding of great products — and I think Slack is a testament to that.
(Via Daring Fireball)
Microaggressions in Hollywood
Actress Mila Kunis exposes the microaggressions she experienced while trying to get work in Hollywood:
“If this is happening to me, it is happening more aggressively to women everywhere.”
We craft not just the products of our culture, but our culture itself with the actions, behaviors and policies we put in place and normalize. Bravo to Kunis for shining another light on this.
U.S. Election thoughts
There have been countless things to unpack following the U.S. Presidential Election, but the most under-examined aspect has been the influence of social media and fake news. Product Matters very specifically examines how products affect society by the very nature of how they operate, and in that context the unprecedented role Facebook and Twitter played deserves a lot of scrutiny. Zeynep Tufekci writes about it at New York Times, as does Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed News.
I wrote about Twitter’s role in shaping social dynamics here on Product Matters, with much more to come in the future. There is a new urgency to rooting out the toxic and divisive role that misinformation and bad product design play in our society, and we will all have to rise up to the challenge.
Milton Glaser
If we treat societal progress as a product of the good work of our elected representatives and our collective actions, then design is a fundamental element of it. Design legend Milton Glaser recently gave us a very useful, actionable definition of design that will be of great use in the years to come:
“Design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one.”
Let us design a brighter, preferred future for everyone.
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