Once upon a time, when trees were small and I defined myself through my profession, this blog started as a product management blog. Today, we return to those glorious days: oh, what sweet summer children we were back in 2019!
I love examples of good, small-scale UX: usually these are scenarios that can always be validated with data, yet are almost impossible to anticipate unless you actually “eat your own dog food.” One example that has been circulating a lot recently is Apple TV turning on subtitles when a user rewinds the video by 10 seconds. A wonderful intuition: “Why rewind by 10 seconds? Most likely because you didn’t catch what was said!” — and an incredibly easy hypothesis to validate using existing data.
And then, in the middle of the month, I encountered a good UX example on Uber’s side. I had a 10 a.m. flight from Lisbon to New York, and for the past six years I hadn’t flown out of the Schengen zone from anywhere other than Budapest. I had no understanding of how early I needed to arrive, or how Lisbon airport worked at all. I started booking a ride, and Uber предложed a very logical sequence of questions: which airline? Which flight? After that, it suggested that I aim for a 7 a.m. drop-off — meaning I should get into the car at 6:30.
Look, it’s not even about the fact that I couldn’t do all these calculations myself. It’s about being freed from the thought “what if I got it wrong.” Obviously, if the queues at the airport turn out to be longer, Uber won’t compensate me for its incorrect estimate. But what matters is that I was spared the excess mental effort: it’s not me frantically trying to solve a problem with a million unknowns — I’m simply taking a decision grounded in the corporation’s knowledge. Very convenient.
In short, good UX is always about understanding user pain, about understanding which areas of life a product enters — and about the ability to step beyond the boundaries of the app, solving a little more than what is strictly required.