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User-Centered Product Management

whatusersdo.com

Things I learned:

Listening to the users' explicit feedback is almost always a) at best pointless, b) at worst incredibly disruptive (in a bad way).

Watching your users use your product (in person!) is almost always enlightening.

None of these lessons are new; I'm sure they've been around since at least the 60s.

Agreed completely, Johansch.

Re explicitly following directions from users being a bad idea, Janna Bastow (of Mind The Product) says as much in her section of the article.

I think it's still important to gather feedback though—it's not the answer, but it can point you towards the right question.

I think, in broad strokes, the opinions are always going to be the same—i.e. get user feedback and do usability testing. But the nuances in how each person does those two things (and various methodologies applied) is where we can learn from each other.

Right. Don't immediately follow their very strongly worded suggestion for feature X, ask instead what problem Y they are attempting to get solved. Then use this this as one input out of many.

But surely this is old news to any prospective PM?

Right again. It is (or should be).

I personally enjoyed the parts where people discussed methodologies (user stories vs Jobs To Be Done, for example), than the broad strokes opinions.

Hard to take seriously a "User-Centered" article on a website that hijacks your browser's scroll.

I typically dismiss these sometimes overly cynical comments, but as a product manager myself, I really have to agree.

I wonder if the irony dawns on them at all.

Hi guys,

Really sorry to hear you're having an unpleasant experience.

Would you mind telling me which devices, OS's and browsers (or other relevant info) you're using when you encounter these issues?

If you work in UX or product (which it sounds like you do), you probably know no one ships a perfect experience (in spite of our best efforts). It's not due to negligence or bad intentions.

We've run several rounds of UX testing on our site and the overwhelming majority of people don't experience any scroll-jacking. There's obviously some kind of death-combo that causes problems for some users.

So, we're neither ignoring our UX nor trying deliberately to punish you. We would be in your debt if you could help us figure out what's going on here!

I suspect it's some kind of issue with Wordpress itself... but I'm no (hardcore) techie and can't seem to find the root.

Hey, sorry to be a jerk about it! I understand these things are not at all intentional, just kind of easily overlooked.

I looked into your code, and it looks like you guys use a javascript library called SmoothScroll v1.2.1. I'd suggest just removing that bad-boy. Good luck!

Omg, thanks so much, dude!

I'm gonna look into this first thing in the morning (it's way past working hours here in London).

I can't wait to get rid of that pesky thing :)

I'm running Chrome on a Mac and suffering the same. TBH this should probably be your first or second test.

Hi @the_gastropod, @balero and @temp246810,

The scroll-jacking has been removed! Thanks for all your feedback.

Be sure to clear your cache before checking the article again and it should all be fine :)

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