> Of course, making it usable is often the hardest part and adds the most value for the consumer.
As someone that considers UX and a user-centric approach to technology as their "edge" compared to most technologists, this is what keeps surprising me - because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all. Compared to something like, say, solving differential equations, then I'd say that it seems fairly obvious, trivial even, to practice basic empathy and ask simple questions like "What could an average person get out of this technology?" and "How many of the technical details could we handle automatically so people don't have to bother with them yet still get most of the benefits?". At most I'd say it's the last 10-20% of the work on top of all the hard work on the tech (not because it's a small amount of work, but because the tech that comes before is so hard and time-consuming). But the company that gets the final part right gets most of the rewards (Pareto FTW!). Yet for some reason this tends to be different companies, doing the ground work and successfully commercializing the tech - why is that? Is it that hard to foster both a deeply tech-oriented and user-oriented culture in the same company? Is it too costly to invest in building expertise in both areas, so companies tend to choose one or the other? Is it because B2C is much higher risk than B2B, so it attracts a different kind of entrepreneurs?
When you're deep into the tech it's difficult to see beyond. You get used the rough edges and even grow to like and appreciate them.
It can take a fresh pair of eyes to look at things and see a different way forward, and then be bold enough to try. This usually involves stripping away features to make things more simple. That's not always a popular choice in engineering circles.
In technology, it's especially tricky to think about the 'average user' when you're surrounded by other technologists.
Honestly man, I can handle math without issues. Differential equations are no big deal. But if you ask me to design a workflow, I'm going to give you the blankest stare ever because I don't even have a clue where to start. I can probably kludge something together based on how I could see someone else using the product, but in all likelihood, I'm just training myself to do it the way that's most natural for whatever I'm building.
Empathy is one piece of design. But if you can't visualize different modes of operation, you can't choose the most empathetic one. I suspect the real issue is that people with both deep technology and ux skills are rare. They require you to keep two entirely different problem spaces in your head and explore them together.
"...because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all."
Think about the amount of "empathy" that went into the first iPhone. All of the work to design an efficient way to display information and navigate on such a small device. Pinch to zoom. Inertial scrolling. Virtual keyboard to maximize screen space when you aren't typing. Swiping to navigate. Both dreaming up solutions like this and then making them real is extremely hard work and requires a lot of skill, talent, and knowledge.
It's not clear to me that making a smaller hard drive or a faster CPU or a screen with more pixels, are necessarily harder problems to solve than the kind of user experience problems Apple tackles. (Or used to tackle, depending on your view of post-Jobs Apple.)
Often this means providing an abstraction which won't break for most users. sadly, such abstractions are often like a duck - paddling madly under the water.
As someone that considers UX and a user-centric approach to technology as their "edge" compared to most technologists, this is what keeps surprising me - because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all. Compared to something like, say, solving differential equations, then I'd say that it seems fairly obvious, trivial even, to practice basic empathy and ask simple questions like "What could an average person get out of this technology?" and "How many of the technical details could we handle automatically so people don't have to bother with them yet still get most of the benefits?". At most I'd say it's the last 10-20% of the work on top of all the hard work on the tech (not because it's a small amount of work, but because the tech that comes before is so hard and time-consuming). But the company that gets the final part right gets most of the rewards (Pareto FTW!). Yet for some reason this tends to be different companies, doing the ground work and successfully commercializing the tech - why is that? Is it that hard to foster both a deeply tech-oriented and user-oriented culture in the same company? Is it too costly to invest in building expertise in both areas, so companies tend to choose one or the other? Is it because B2C is much higher risk than B2B, so it attracts a different kind of entrepreneurs?