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Wanted: software designers who don’t know software
I enjoy talking about software with my daughter. Ideas flow when we do. A few months ago, her favorite software was Sim City. She wished she was able to download a model of Montreal (where we live) and have it updated in real-time to reflect the real-estate developments of the city. I made sure not to explain to her the prohibitive complexity of such a feature. Now, she won’t stop talking about Sims. One of her wishes is to be able to interact with her friends in a Sims world they build together (this one’s coming up). When we talk about what she would like software do, it is amazing to see how many product ideas would be very popular with girls her age – yet, not available commercially. The lack of software for girls is a symptom of a larger problem I see within software industry. The industry has done a very poor job at involving “outsiders” in product development. I believe the reason is in the way software industry has developed. We (software designers) have honored the law of eating-your-own-dog-food so well we’ve neglected the needs and desires of people different from ourselves. For a lot of us, it became really hard to build a software product we would never imagine of using ourselves. The problem isn’t in product usability – by the time the product hits the usability lab it’s usually too late. The problem is in the origins of product design. The examples that illustrate this point are many. Games for girls. Compare the market size of games for boys and men with market size of games for girls and women. I would guess the ratio is somewhere around 30:1. Apart from unexplored commercial opportunity the gender gap leads to other issues. Another huge segment underserved by software – the elderly. Elderly represent huge part of population who have strong needs to stay in touch, to communicate, to feel part of sociery. How many software products are directed to them? Not many. Numerous attempts to cater to this market weren’t stellar successes. Inversely, we see some great products for knowledge workers. Of course, software designers are knowledge workers themselves. It is much easier for a software marketing manager to understand the issues of an accountant rather than an old lady who spends most of her time alone in her house. The result – accountants can now benefit from Excel, Outlook, Groove while that old lady still relies on the telephone and TV to keep in touch with the world. Clearly, software fails to satisfy people who are much different from the average software developers. The number of such people is significant and software industry has a lot to loose by ignoring them. I believe that the next big wave of growth in computing will come from people who aren’t using computers yet. But for this to work, new kinds of people should be involved in software design. People who are different from average software developers. Girls, elderly, uneducated and other non knowledge-worker types of people. It would be harder for developers to make sense of how to build products based on weird illogical requirements expressed in language foreign to software. But developers who will learn how to listen and understand will be the first to take the prize. The reason I like to talk about software with my daughter is because she’s different from me. I learn how to interpret weird requirements and that’s really useful.
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