Best tool for the job

To hang a picture on the wall, do you drill a hole or use stickers?

Or let’s take a problem from the software world...

Imagine you have a table in MS Word with a column of financial data.

You need to run some calculations, so you want to move the numbers into a spreadsheet and use it in some formulas.

If you copy and paste directly, you’ll have an array of strings because the spreadsheet will interpret the currency+number combination as text.

Before pasting, you have to cleanse the data by ridding it of the currency sign.

There are many ways you could go about it:

• Write a short script that finds and removes the currency sign
• Copy&paste into a spreadsheet as is, then convert with a formula

• Find “￡” and replace it with “” in MS Word

What is the best tool for doing this?

Well, it depends on who you’re talking to.

• A programmer will prefer a script
• A financial analyst will prefer Excel formulas
• A lawyer might prefer Word

And I would prefer TextMate. It’s a plain text editor supporting vertical selection across multiple lines that I can delete.

Using TextMate might be the fastest of all. It is also the leanest (no formatting in plain text). But no other persona from the list would name it the best.

These personas don’t know the best tool exists. They have their own bias towards tools.

Being in a product role, there’s a multitude of ways you can use this phenomenon to your advantage:

• As you pitch your solution to your customer, be aware of the biases towards tools: your own and theirs.
• As you shape your solution, make interface design choices based on their preferences. This will reduce the adoption barrier for your customers.
• As you analyse jobs-to-be-done, isolate the job well and consider all possible tools for completing it. You may find a solution your customers don’t know about but can easily adopt.
• As you segment your target audience, consider if each segment has different inherent biases you need to account for.

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Truly yours, Sergey Soloviov