Don’t Assume
Let me tell you a Kutti Story!
Imagine you are going to a new supermarket near your home to buy some of your favorite fruits, like something fresh and juicy, like a mango. Now stop imagining Katrina Kaif. Till date i never understood why Katrina Kaif was seducing a mango. Not sure if that advertisement was for aamsutra or kaamsutra.
Coming back to fruits, you go to the fruits section and find a lot of new fruits that you’ve never seen or tasted in your life. So you call the shopkeeper and enquire what fruit is it and how much is the price, every single time for each fruit, moving forward.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a small board under each fruit that has the name, and price of that fruit? Maybe the shopkeeper would have thought the customers knew very well about the fruits already. Hence neglected the option of naming them in the section.
But you are still not sure to buy those fruits because you never tasted it before. If it were an apple or mango ( Stop Imagining Katrina again ) you would have clearly guessed its taste. Here is where the twist comes in the story. Loosen up your seat belts.
So at this point, you happen to see someone mopping the floor and eating the fruit, that you are confused to buy. Imagine that character as Morgan Freeman.. No like Samuthra Kani ( Ocean fruit — you see what I did there ). He offers you another fresh fruit to taste and you find it surprisingly delicious and similar to the taste of mango.
Wouldn’t it be even more great if there was a sample piece of fruit for you to taste, before you make the decision to buy something in bulk? This helps even an illiterate to make better choices.
Coming back to life, recently i was very much excited to use this product called “Miro ‘’ an online white board with multiple amazing features inside.
What I found little difficult was understanding the icons/tools ( especially the ones at the bottom left ). And the worst part is, the tool icons don’t have labels. Only when you hover the mouse on them, you get to know the name of the tool but still you will not know how the tool works. I completely agree if there was an icon like save or export without labels because those icons are almost universal, plus you clearly have a visual memory of it.
Even though Miro has an explanation video sort of thing in their guide section, I feel a little uncomfortable navigating to the guide option and selecting the section that I want to learn followed by the tool I want to learn every single time.
A Product can have amazing solutions to the user’s problems but it should also provide a good user experience, navigating them through the problem till they accomplish their task. Don’t assume your user knows everything and always believe every product can be enhanced way better just with little things.
Here are some of the things that Miro could have done it to make it easier for people like me.
So never assume strongly anything, unless you are so sure about it, backed with fact/data. Understand the users and empathize with them and make things easier for them. But one thing still nobody could understand till date is why Katrina Kaif was biting the juice bottle instead of the actual mango.
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