A few days ago the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency accidentally set of a missile alert that sent the island’s population into a wave of panic. After the alert was recalled and peace was reinstated (pun intended), the story spread over the news like wildfire. The chief question on everyone’s mind was “how could this happen?”
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We recently noticed an interesting trend that has been popping up of late: SaaS companies are re-introducing old features. More and more product companies are recycling older features and “releasing” them, with no indication that these are not new features.
This smart practice makes so much sense on so many different levels, that it’s surprising it didn’t gain traction earlier.
For starters, it’s a clever marketing move. Advertising your capabilities is one of the most efficient ways to get through to your target audience.
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One of the most cringe-worthy tips for accelerating product adoption, which I come across quite often, is “build a product that users will love”. Right up there with “Just do it”, right?
Input like that indicates to me a profound lack of understanding of the whole product-user relationship, of user psychology, and of the product design & development process.
The truth is that most people (and users) would rather avoid change. Learning inherently means stepping out of one’s comfort zone, so most users try to avoid that, too. It’s not bad, lazy or wrong – it’s just the way we’re built.
As training professionals and product leaders, it’s our job to make the learning part as quick and as painless as possible. Users fall in love with products. We can facilitate this by helping the user to get to know the product better.
As 2016 continues to unfold, there seems to be a lot of concern about the future of training. One of the hot topics of discussions is how training should evolve to support the changing needs of the millennials, who are becoming a majority in the work force. One of the hottest trends is video training – short 2 minute videos that are easy to follow and address.
Don’t get me wrong – video training is a massive improvement over lengthy text documents and manuals. Training videos epitomize the desire for advanced, creative and dynamic training solutions. For a long time video training was an indication of advanced technological capabilities and superior customer service capacity. They even made poor navigation design and confusing UX forgivable, because there was a way to bridge the experience.
But video training comes with a pair of unavoidable twin problems – cost and decay. They are connected in that special way things that cost too much and live a very short life are. That’s the TL;DR. Here’s a breakdown of the problems:
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