Category: ux

Three things I got right as a PM leader

Rakesh Agrawal

Previous post: Three things I got wrong as a PM leader.

Understanding customer psychology is key

The best products come from the intersection of technology and psychology. Part of the fun of creating new products is trying to figure out things other people haven’t. Imagine someone dumped a pile of small, multi-colored plastic shapes that interlock in front of you in 1948. Dump them in front of someone and they’ll think it is junk.

Put a picture of a houses or airplane on the box and they’ll be able to fill in the gaps. This is what I can do with those Legos. You’ve provided people a framework for understanding and sparking their creativity.

Understanding psychology includes using all of the senses. Incorporate sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. (OK, smell and taste aren’t necessarily applicable to online products.)

I was at a ski resort and their lift ticket scanners would beep when the ticket was scanned. But the beep was just a confirmation that it was scanned, not an indicator of whether it was valid. The liftie had to look at the display to see the ticket status. It could mean moving gloves out in the cold. If I were designing it, the scanner would beep differently based on whether the ticket was valid or not. There would also be big green and red lights on top the scanner.

Haptics are often overlooked, but they can be very useful. When you’re using walking directions, Apple Watch will tap you on the wrist to indicate that you need to make a turn. What they could do better: have a different tap pattern based on whether you need to make a left turn or right. You wouldn’t have to look down at the watch to see the arrow.

Price is not everything

Yes, price matters. But understanding and being able to contextualize price is important. 

We had a feature-rich product that you could use in a lot of different ways — making phone calls, checking email, storing files and sending faxes (!). It was a great set of features, but because it was a new product, people had no understanding of how much it should cost. In fact, we were underpricing it. I was able to create bundles of features that were more widely understood and comparable to how competitors priced things. We were able to double prices and double adoption.

Think carefully about whether you want to charge at all. There is a much bigger psychological difference between $0.00 and $0.01 than between $0.01 and $1.00.

Simplicity of payment also matters. In the Bay Area, there are more than two dozen transit agencies. Each has its own pricing and fare structure. Passes are different. Not only did you have to figure out how much it cost, your had to figure out how to pay. The payment part was simplified by having an NFC card that worked across the systems. 

Some systems have gotten even simpler. In NYC and London, you can use your contactless credit card. No more having to find and buy a separate card.

If you’re shipping physical products, it’s a giant mistake to not incorporate Apple Pay. Apple created a great system to minimize friction in online commerce. Use it. This is especially true if you have low frequency customers.

Whoever sets the defaults controls the world

In general people want to do the least amount of effort, especially things that they aren’t super interested in. They will do whatever is easiest. 

The new tablet-based point-of-sale systems make it easy to tip 15%, 18%, 20% etc. (depending on the system). You can tip less or more, but that usually requires going to a submenu and entering an amount. Not only is picking the pre-filled amounts easier, it tells users that they should tip one of those amounts. (Hey cheapskate!)

Think about walking through a supermarket. The big brands make it convenient to buy their products. They pay slotting fees to grocers to ensure that their products are at eye level or on the end caps. The better values, either in terms of quality or price, aren’t at eye level.

By setting the right defaults, you can push the metrics you want toward your preferred direction.

Three things I got wrong as a PM leader

Rakesh Agrawal

Listening to customers

Listening to your customers can lead you down the wrong path, whether you are talking about consumer or enterprise customers. People don’t necessarily know what they want. People don’t know what’s possible. Some people want the kitchen sink.

I find focus groups to be essentially useless when testing innovation. If you want to test new fragrances for Tide, go ahead. But if you want to test a brand new concept, focus groups won’t get it. 

Listening to your early adopters is especially dangerous. They might seem like the “best” customers because they came to you first. Unfortunately, that’s a small base and likely unrepresentative of your target market if you’re looking for mass scale.

Better than listening to your customers is understanding your customers. You can watch what potential customers do. Be in their environment. Building a product for restaurant kitchens? Go work the line for a day. Think of it as a mini Undercover Boss. You can often learn more in observing for 15 minutes than two hours of conversation.

I sat looking over the shoulders of people using one of my products. I watched as they cut-and-pasted data from one window to another and then made minor edits. It was tedious. I went back and redesigned it so that my system (the new one) pre-populated the data from the older system.

If you’re testing a new product with real users, watch them use it and see where they get stuck. Try not to help them – you won’t be there to help them when they’re using your product in real life.

Adding too many features

As a nerd, I’ve always wanted more features. I’m the person who went through all of the settings screens to customize every new product or service to exactly my taste. 

What I discovered early on is that most people don’t want more features. In an early product, we had search results pages for news stories. I added in controls to allow you to pick how many stories showed up on a page and how large an excerpt from each story you wanted to see. 

Terrible idea. It complicated the page for users. They had the additional cognitive load of looking at those controls versus seeing what they came for. It also made it harder and slower to render the page. We were better off just stripping all of that code out and delivering the pages faster. 

Product managers might not think of “speed” as a feature, but it’s one of the most critical ones. Take too long to render and people will go elsewhere.

In an early test at Google, customers said they wanted 30 results per page. When it was rolled out, the page with 10 results was the winner. It rendered 0.5 seconds faster.

My own needs have changed over time. I don’t want more features. I don’t want more settings pages. I want things to work out of the box.

Believing you can’t fight City Hall

This one will undoubtedly be controversial. Sometimes the biggest innovation comes from pushing the boundaries. If you had paid strict attention to copyright laws, you might avoid building Google. The search engine literally copied almost everything online, word-for-word. 

A friend had an idea for an on-demand transportation company. After thinking about it, he decided that it would violate local taxi ordinances, employment laws and be a liability nightmare and decided not to pursue it. Uber said “screw it” and went for it. It’s now a $140 billion business.

This is an area where startups have a huge advantage over large companies. BigCo lawyers will say “no” to anything that presents a sizable risk to their core business. It takes 10 people to say “yes” and 1 person to say “no.” See my post “Could YouTube have come from a large company?” (The post is from 2006, so a lot of the questions I asked then have been answered.)

Sometimes, as with YouTube, getting sued can be great for the business.

Startups also need to be wary of people who have spent all of their time in big companies. It may be tempting to hire someone who has 25 years of payments expertise for your payments company. You just need to make sure they don’t have all of the rules and “we can’t do that” baked in.

As my friend and noted angel investor Gokul Rajaram says, it’s important to push the boundaries, just don’t to things that might have you end up in jail. If you do go over the line, you might be joining Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Part 2: Three things I got right…

Less please… decluttering online maps

Rakesh Agrawal

Online maps have revolutionized how we travel. No more unfolding (and worse, refolding) paper maps or flipping through dated Thomas Guides. No driving around in circles because you made a wrong turn. Less getting stuck in traffic.

But as the technology, point-of-interest data and interfaces have improved, we’ve cluttered the user interface. Instead of focusing on what users care about, we’ve added lot of junk.

Consider the map above. How many people are going to randomly decide that they want to go to Floor & Decor, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Valero (um, I’m driving an EV!), Quality Appliance Repair or Maple Auto Body? I’ve already told the computer my goal: getting to 2860 Spring St.

Maps should show:

  • What the user has searched for.
  • Where the user is.
  • Prominent navigational aids, e.g. near this screenshot you would have passed the airport.
  • Obstacles, e.g. traffic accidents.
  • Traffic lights and stop signs along the user’s route. (Inexplicably, Google Maps still doesn’t do this in the U.S.; Apple does.)

If the business model calls for it, ads can be shown.

Otherwise, get out of the user’s way!

Pick a card, any card

Rakesh Agrawal

Something many sites get wrong: not letting you store a description of a credit card. This is too often what stored credit cards look like:

From that list, a consumer doesn’t know what each card is for. It’s common for customers to use a corporate card, spouse’s card, FSA or a card for a specific purpose, e.g. to get free checked bags on an airline credit card.

A better approach is to let the customer label the cards.

Some people won’t care, so you can have the card description (e.g. “Amex … 1004”) prefilled in the label field. This approach doesn’t add friction for those who don’t need it, but removes friction for those who do.

Solving the problem vs. meeting the ask

Rakesh Agrawal

An oft-repeated phrase in product management is to ask the customer what they want. The best product managers know that the best approach is to understand what they need.

One example:

In my condo complex, there is a heavy fire door between the garage and the entryway. It’s common for people to bring heavy items from their car into the building. The ask was to add an automatic door opener.

After some research, we discovered that because of the construction of the building, adding an automatic door opener would cost about $25,000.

But when we looked at the need, it was to get easier access from the garage to the entry. The old system required that people had to turn a handle to open the door. We found that by adding an automatic unlock solved the problem. People didn’t have to put down what they were carrying, the door would unlock and they could easily push it while holding their packages.

We solved the need, without the expense.

The best PMs find the annoyances in everyday life and think about how to fix them, even it’s not something they can fix. Learning the thought process is key.

Bingo! you lose with Marriott

Rakesh Agrawal

The Marriott mobile app has one of the worst search features out that. Marriott has 30 brands that run the gamut from Fairfield Inn to St. Regis. There are some that I will stay at, some that I won’t.

By default, it shows you all 30. When I do a search for NYC, it returns 199 hotels. If I filter it to just the hotels I would consider staying at it drops to a more manageable 44.

The problem is that it resets when you do a search. I have to go back in every time and select the brands.

They’re not even grouped logically, making choice even harder.

Marriott app filter tool

At least they do the grouping correctly on Web site.

Random

Rakesh Agrawal

Sometimes when you do survey research, you want to randomize the order of things to make sure that results aren’t biased by whatever shows up first.

Selecting a home country is not one of those times. I don’t know what Amazon was thinking.

The right way to present a list like this is alphabetical, with the most common countries (and geo located countries) at the top.

Not commonly done, but better: repeat countries at the top in the alphabetical section.

A PM’s view of Apple Vision Pro

Rakesh Agrawal

See also: my impressions of Apple Vision Pro and VR/AR in general.

The Apple Vision Pro is the best V1 of a product I’ve seen in a long time. But whenever you’re creating a completely new visual and input interface, you’re going to have some polishing to do.

There are some issues that are just the state of new technology and will get better over the course of time: weight, comfort, cost and stability being at the top of the list.

Eye tracking and gesture tracking is as good as I’ve seen, but it still needs improvement. This problem is exacerbated by the very subtle distinction among selected items. More on that below.

Some have complained that the AVP can cause nausea. I haven’t had that issue. The issue I have run into is the repeated use of the pinch gesture. It can cause my hand to get tired and I fear getting RSI. I had to take a break, not because of the weight of the headset but because my hands got tired. (This may also be an artifact of testing; if I were just watching a movie, this wouldn’t be an issue.)

Putting on my product manager and usability hat, here are the top new features and fixes I would make:

New features

Multiuser support

A $3,500 device should provide multiuser support. I can’t easily share it with my family. At a minimum, I should be able to switch among Apple Family Sharing users. AVP does have a guest mode, but it requires reconfiguration each time.

Importing iPad apps

As with all new hardware, initial software is going to be limited. Apple has some great demos and a few apps built by third-party developers that take full advantage of the AVP interface and features. But you’ll burn through them quickly.

AVP also supports iPad apps. They don’t provide the same rich experience as native apps, but they do provide valuable features. Notably, most of the frequently used Apple apps haven’t been re-written for AVP.

AVP allows you to go through the App Store and manually select iPad apps. It would be better if it provided a list of your most frequently used apps to add them with a few clicks.

Automatic free trials

Out of the box, users should have 7- to 30-days of free access to all of the AVP optimized apps. This would give them the ability to really experience the power of the platform.

I had the same issue with Oculus. In order to fully understand the device, I had to buy a lot of games. I wasn’t going to do that.

Demo/training mode

Unlike most products, it’s hard to teach someone to navigate the interface. AVP already has a screen mirroring feature that allows someone else to see what the AVP pro is seeing.

When I’ve shown friends how to use the AVP, I’ve had to say “look all the way to the right, look down, see that?”

Add a “laser pointer” to that mode. Instead of having to talk the directions, I could have a pointer appear on the screen to guide them. You could all add a reverse pointer, where the trainer could see where the eyes are looking.

Fixes and tweaks

Setting up AVP

For initial setup, the AVP requires that you hold your iPhone near it to download account credentials. It’s unclear how far you need to hold it. I found myself repeatedly moving my arm forward and backward while trying to pair it.

Sample content

When you try AVP in store, there are some gorgeous pictures that are shot for purpose. They show off spatial video and photos, panoramas and other features of the device. At the risk of pulling a U2, those sample images and videos should be included in the Photos app. (Possibly in a folder labeled Sample Content, in much the same way that Windows included sample pictures.)

My initial reaction when I saw those pictures: I need to buy an iPhone 15 Pro so that I can capture spatial photos.

Too little differentiation between items when selecting

This is one of the biggest usability issues. The difference between selected and non-selected items is very slight. For a device that requires looking at an item to pick it and where you don’t have precision control like with a mouse, this is a big problem. It’s especially a pain when using the on-screen keyboard. (See more below.)

I thought this would be changeable in accessibility settings, but I couldn’t find it. Regardless, the default differentiation needs to be greater and some users would benefit from being able to set it even higher.

Keyboard

Hate the on-screen keyboards where you have to navigate with a remote control to enter data? The AVP’s virtual keyboard is at least 10 times more difficult than those. It took me 5 minutes just to enter my Disney+ login information. There were too many misread keystrokes.

For AVP to be a content production device, the keyboard needs to be much better. Yes, you can pair a physical bluetooth keyboard, but that’s yet another accessory to carry with you.

Top left menu item is really difficult to access

AVP has a side panel that is used to navigate among key controls. Selecting the top item was very difficult. Given that the item is “Applications,” this really needs to be improved.

I initially thought it was an eye tracking problem for me, but I had a friend try it and he had the same issue.

Control Center too hard to get to

Similar to the above issue. As with iPhone, the Control Center comes down from the top. The way it is supposed to work is that you look up and can select it. Frequently, I put my head back as far as my neck would allow and I still couldn’t get the Control Center tab to come up. Again, my friend had the same issue.

At other times, it’s a gnat that I can’t swat away.

Lack of progress indicator when launching apps

Sometimes there is a delay when trying to launch an app. Because the background is a passthrough of what your eyes are looking at, it feels like something crashed or that the app didn’t launch. A spinner or loading indicator would make this a more comfortable experience.

Universal transport controls

This isn’t AVP specific, but it has long been on my video wishlist, and with a change to a completely new environment, maybe I can finally get it.

I want rewind, fast forward, play, pause, skip, go back and other transport controls to work the same regardless of which video app I’m in.

I want the numbers on the right side to reflect how much time is left in the video I’m watching. (Showing the total duration isn’t very helpful. It’s also not a good use of space: the number doesn’t change.) When I press skip, I don’t want it to go forward 5 seconds in one player, 15 seconds in another and 30 seconds in another.

My cable TV and DVR remotes didn’t work differently depending on what channel I was watching. This is the same. Transport controls aren’t a competitive differentiator. Unless there is an app-specific feature (like Prime Video’s X-ray), they should work the same.

The only exception is the skip feature during ads. That control can be disable during an ad and not shown on ad-free services.

Redesign the Roku remote

Rakesh Agrawal

This is one of the questions I use when teach my PM classes and interview PM candidates.

Question

You are the PM responsible for Roku’s remote. On the remote, you have hard buttons that route to various streaming services.

  • How do you decide which services you put on the buttons?
  • How many buttons do you put on the remote?
  • Do you allow the user to reprogram buttons for services that they don’t use?

Answer

This question is about optimizing the combination of user benefit, brand and marketing revenue.

There has to be a Netflix button, even if they don’t pay you a dime. (If I’m negotiating a distribution deal on behalf of Netflix, I might even start with the position that you have to pay me to use the Netflix logo.) Without a Netflix button, your product will look defective and it would discourage purchases. From a usability perspective, it would also make the experience for the most popular streaming service much worse.

After that, if you’re part of a conglomerate, you add a button for your service. If it’s a Fire device, add a button for Prime Video. If it’s a Chromecast, add a button for YouTube. (Trust me on this. If you ship without it, you might get fired.)

Beyond that, there are so many services out there. Disney+, Apple TV+, Hulu, Paramount+, Max, tubi, Peacock, Spotify, Crackle, Zee TV, etc. You can’t and shouldn’t put a button for everything on it. The fewer buttons, the more you can charge for those buttons; it essentially becomes an auction. I’d probably cap it at 4.

I’d price based on two components: a price just to have the custom button (a slotting fee) and an acquisition fee, a dollar amount for each subscription I sell to that service.

The second part is trickier. You don’t want the highest revenue for each subscription, you also want the ones most likely to convert. A Disney+ subscription is more likely to convert than a subscription for Fubo.

That’s just one way to do it. There are all sorts of variations: guaranteed minimum, percentage of ongoing subscription revenue, rev share on ads, etc. You don’t have to do the same thing with every partner. Probe to see what are possibilities. E.g. some services might not have the technical capability to do

You should always take into account consumer value. Having a hard button for CuriosityStream is going to make your product look defective. (No offense to CuriosityStream, they have great content. It’s just not a mass product.) I once had a Roku remote with a Blockbuster button. I don’t know if they put it on ironically.

Don’t forget localization! (Known to us product nerds as l10n.) If you’re selling the product in multiple countries, find the optimal set of services for that market. For example, in India, Hotstar is an important service. Hulu, which might make sense for the U.S. market, isn’t available in India.

I would let people customize unused buttons. There’s no point having consumers get annoyed by a service that they will never install. There are various ways to implement this: bury it in settings, have a counter that after they push the button 5 times and don’t convert, offer to switch it for them.

Update: Google actively prompts you to change the pre-configured YouTube button if you don’t use enough. (I primarily use Hulu and Netflix.)

Posted in ux

Lists should be presented in an easy-to-understand order

Rakesh Agrawal

How could this experience be improved?

Notifications.
Notifications screen in iOS.

This is so bizarre that I can’t believe Apple missed it. The notification settings screen is in no discernbile order.

If you want to turn off or change notifications, you have to scroll through the list until you find what you’re looking for.

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