User Interface serves the purpose

While visiting my parents' place, I found the following label on a light switch by a walk-in closet door.

'Off' is not the up-position.

It made me pause.  Wait, is the light switch flipped so that up position is on and down position is off?  I opened the door and checked.  No, it was not.  Light was turned off.  Mother must have labeled it wrong.

When I was stepping out in the morning, I saw another light switch label by the side entrance to the garage.  It also had an incorrect label except that it's even bigger.

'Off' is definitely not the up-position.
Label maker must have something else in mind.

Why would Mother put wrong labels on the light switches?  Doesn't she know that up is on, down is off?

Product Management: Prototyping is your job

One of the key responsibilities of product manager is to make sure that product is usable by the customers.  This is a difficult task for a novice product manager.  That's because it is easy to jump right into designing product without understanding what the problem is to be solved and how the product should help the user solve the problem.

Often this understanding the problem and testing the solution step receive cursory review.  This shows up later in the product training and deployment phase, and by the time it is recognized it's often expensive to change the product behavior or user interface.

That's why all product managers should thinking about building a prototype.  This is especially true for a Version 1.0 product because the risk of missing the key value to customer is far greater because of initial engineering investment cost is higher hence product managers have to make lots of trade-offs.  It's easy to trade off something critical and only to release a product that is not good enough for anyone.

Don't Make Me Think: Recycle, It's Good For The Environment; It's Good For Users

Recently I enjoyed reading Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, The Second Edition. For those of you who are Web design practitioners, I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy and go through it.

After reading through it, one of the lessons that stuck with me was the benefits of leveraging established user interface design: Fancy word for recycling what's known to work.

In some sense this flies in the face of innovation. Innovation is good, as long as it is done in a way that minimizes the user's mental exercise to learn and get accustomed to it. If the learning curve is too steep, or even worse the interface is not guiding users where to begin, it will fail. In other words, the center of innovation should be human, the users.