Week 2: User-Centric Designs in B2B, GDPR in Product Metrics, Polymathic PMs and Hick's Law

This week you'll read about:

• User centric designs in B2B applications
• GDPR compliance with Google Analytics
• Why you may want to become polymathic as a PM
• How to build simple designs with Hick's Law
• and a surprise at the end!

Subscribe, like, repost and comment!

User-centric designs in B2B applications

The user centered design of modern SaaS solutions is the natural next step in the evolution of B2B products. It has always been inevitable, but unlike some changes in product designs this one is just brilliant.

The B2B space is getting increasingly subsumed by the B2C practices: where the corporate needs are perceived to be inferior to the needs of the end user. The B2B is now evolving into the B2B4C. Business to business for consumers.

It is more than just the colourful and modern look and feel. Although there is that too and nothing’s wrong with that.

What user centered B2B designs are:

• Accessible and intuitive designs for human users (the number of times I had to explain the colour contrast requirement alone to companies is frankly embarrassing)
• Emotional user journey is an equal companion of the traditional user journey and process mapping
• Tested by end users and not the procurement or sales teams?

What user centered B2B designs are NOT:

• Social media wannabes with loss of sight of what is the actual goal that the end user came to the product for and what it was bought for by the business
• Chasers of the hype trends without adding value, although undoubtedly these make for catchy marketing campaigns

More reading on it:

More podcast on it:

GDPR in product analytics

And here I was thinking I was done with the law… In comes the GDPR.?

Data driven product management relies on the quantitative insights about our users: behaviour flows, user statistics, rage clicks, website heat maps, you name it.?

Unless you are a not-for-profit org, you are using products to drive revenues through acquisitions, upselling, retention and conversions by delivering value to your customers and competing on the market with the better user experience. You cannot do that without having access to some platform that helps you measure all of these and your means of achieving it. And for a lot of companies, Google Analytics is that main platform because it’s free.

Here’s the problem: by default, Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant.?

Let me explain.

GDPR says that you can be identified by your device’s IP address, cookie identifiers and even the radio frequency tags. Where websites that want to use Google Analytics install the GA tag, it allows that tag to initiate scripts that collect precisely that information about you as you are clicking through the website. That on its own is not bad. It’s fine.

GDPR also says that you as a user:

• have to be explicitly asked to consent to the collection of your data by Google (that’s why you are asked to accept or reject cookies in every website these days), and
• have a right to be forgotten.

And that’s where the problem lies.

Can Google “forget” you? Theoretically, no.

You may have read the news a few years back where the European Court of Justice pretty much said that the US-headquartered Google could not collect the EU residents’ data because the US government can get their hands on it.?

In the graph below I am trying to explain why they said that.

More reading on it:

More podcast on it:

Polymathic Product Managers

How do you explain to your grandma what it is that you do for a living if you are a product manager? I end up saying that I do a little bit of everything, as long as it gets me to the outcome that I need or want. And that I manage websites.

Engineering, business analysis, architecting, data science, product management - all these career paths attract polymaths, but not all people in these careers are polymaths.?

A polymath is simply somebody who is proficient in multiple areas of knowledge. A cross breed of specialists and generalists, with all the perks and perhaps an insatiable appetite for knowledge and growth.

There is a fascinating talk by Penny Ann Szeto from Amazon (linked below) that dives into how anyone can become polymathic. Because why wouldn’t you want to become one??

Polymaths:

• Have a broad worldview and are highly adaptable to change
• Have diverse interests and are insatiably thirsty for knowledge
• Get obsessed with new details and want to ingest all new information about different topics?
• Have an ability to spot patterns and synthesize solutions
• Are reliable self-driven leaders

More reading on it:

More podcast on it:

Hick's Law (UX)

There is a UX law that governs (or should govern) your product design choices when building complex workflows and information heavy pages.?

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexities of choices available. And it increases logarithmically (aka exponentially fast).

It’s a somewhat intuitive law: if you put too much stuff on one page and expect the user to click on a very specific button on that page, you need to focus on reducing possible user confusion. When engaging with a digital product, a user must first learn how it works and then determine how to find the information they are looking for. That takes a mental effort, or a “cognitive load”, and quite literally uses up the user’s finite memory space.

Here are a few techniques that you can employ that will lead to simpler designs:

• Card sorting in user research: identify what steps you think the users need to take and then ask them to sort the steps (perhaps on sticky notes) into groups that make the most sense to them. Use these groups as the users’ mental model for your information architecture.
• Oversimplification (not abstraction): using iconography to simplify an interface, as long as the used icons are commonly recognised to mean what you want them to mean, and are not too small or unknown to generate further confusion and frustration for the users.

More reading on it:

More podcast on it:

Did you know?

Yay, you've reached the end of my newsletter!

Here's your reward.

Did you know that there is a museum dedicated to failure? It boasts a large collection of failed products and services and teaches us how innovation cannot be without a failure.