Walking in other people’s shoes
Recently, while researching automotive development methods, I came across a curious story about GM’s design process when they were planning to launch a new crossover. They described how they made some men on the development team dress in drag for a day. These men wore skirts, high heels and glued on long nails to understand how women may feel getting in and out and driving the vehicle.
My first impression was how silly, couldn’t they just ask some women what they wanted. But then, I thought, what a brilliant idea! While dressing in drag was a good start, it would have been even more informative, if they had the men live a day in the life of a woman — drive children around, do errands, try to work in the car while waiting at activities and lug all manner of stuff, groceries, plants, packages in and out of cars.
When building products and services for people, the first and most important step is to get to know their journey and immerse yourself in their experience. It is only when you walk in other people’s shoes, can you really know how to solve their problems and make their experience better. This process at GM resulted in surfacing some features and functions that might not have occurred to them otherwise.
For many decades the main approach to designing products for women was “Shrink it and Pink it.” That was an easy approach — it was assumed that the functional needs were the same for men and women and products just needed to be made smaller and prettier.
Here are my everyday tools: a screwdriver with a reversible phillips and flat head bit, a hammer with a screwdriver built into the handle and a measuring tape. And all of them are appropriately shrunk and beautified with floral patterns. They are perfect for most of the day-to-day things I do — tightening the occasional loose screw, hanging pictures, and measuring various distances for activities ranging from planning furniture layouts and planting flowers to surveying land for construction.
The reason I got them was because I could never find anything I needed among the clutter of my husband’s tool box and I felt that getting these feminine looking tools would deter him from using them. As it so happens, he uses them even more than I do because they are handy, accessible, and useful for his everyday jobs too.
What the designers unwittingly got right, notwithstanding the flowers, was that while designing for women, they made the tools so simple and useful that other people liked them too. I had a similar experience while I was working on Google maps. Features like offline maps and navigation using landmarks were built to make maps usable in countries where cellular coverage was poor and road signs often non-existent. But they turned out to be useful to people in other parts of the world as well when they did not have coverage and could not see road signs. If you build products that are intuitive and easy to use, even if they are targeted to a specific group, it is likely that other people will find them useful too.
When I was a graduate student with two little children and a part-time job, I had no time to do anything at home. I had outsourced the house cleaning, my mother helped with the laundry and cooking but it was still impossible for me to find the time to go out and get groceries or drive the children around. For one of my classes, I wrote a business plan for a service that I named — Shop and Deliver. Never got around to building it — the internet was not ubiquitous, ordering and paying was not easy, and the cost was too high but the need was clear. Today Amazon, Doordash and Instacart have solved that for me and countless other people. Uber and Zum have replaced the work of ferrying people around and Heal sends a doctor home so you don’t have to take sick children to ERs. Products and services that make people’s lives convenient at an affordable price will succeed.
In my career building products and services across many different technologies, geographies, and demographics, three lessons stand out:
- Function: You need to deeply understand your users and their journeys to get product features right.
- Usability: Make products easy to use for most essential needs and keep features simple and accessible.
- Convenience: Build products and services that are convenient and save time and offer them at a reasonable price.
