Our latest experience report, Partnering to Improve Usability, shares the story of how Krystina Edwards became a better product owner after putting aside some preconceived notions. Krystina writes, “When planning our engineering applications, the product owners (mostly other engineers) never thought about how easy or intuitive our software was. We were only thinking about whether or not the software solved the underlying engineering problems that the users would face. The differentiator in our software was its ability to solve advanced engineering problems.”
Initially, Krystina’s subject matter expertise and eagerness got in the way of her seeing and appreciating the usability problems her users were having. After some hard knocks, she decided to work harder at collaborating more effectively with her UX team. And that effort paid off.
Krystina reflects, “Ultimately, we learned a humbling lesson: As subject matter experts we have an instinctive bias that we were injecting into our designs and influencing user test sessions. We realized the value of the design team’s expertise and that by partnering with others to design our software we can achieve better UX outcomes.”
Now Krystina and the UX team bring their joint expertise to work on product design. Usability has improved, and Krystina and the UX team continue to learn much from each other.
