A while ago, I was working on a project for a bank. They wanted to combine a payment app inside the banking app that a lot more people were using. And meanwhile the banking app is free, because it's part of your monthly bank account package, the payment app was an additional €0.50 per month.
During endless user interviews and tests, this seemed to be a bigger problem than all of the team initially thought. People would almost get angry when we told them that we're putting new (paid) features in their much-beloved banking app. "Why do I need to pay additional fees just to use this part of the app?", was a question they asked a lot. I was puzzled. €0.50 is not a lot of money, and I knew how much effort and months, if not years, it took to create this whole feature. But people kept saying that and it frustrated the team and me a lot.
Until one day, it hit me. I'm sitting on the wrong side of the table, I thought. Our users are telling us that they don't want apps mashed together that can be 'unlocked' with additional payments. And we were being annoyed by it. One of us wasn't doing our job properly, and it was not the users. The whole project was doomed to be a big failure. We would have a lot more disappointed users than happy ones, the way we (read – The Board) had envisioned it. So after months of working on this project, I and a few other people from the team started raising more and more awareness about the fact that we learned a lot more than how usable the screens are from the user tests.
We learned that we should listen to our users even way before someone comes up with an idea that might seem brilliant on paper but would not work in reality.
I want to thank Contra for being the kind of company that sits on the right side of the table. The kind of company that truly understands that to build something that people love, you should first love the people, not your ideas or your amazing design prototypes. I want to thank Contra for gathering a bunch of amazing human beings from all over the world and giving us the voice that every potential user of a digital product deserves.
2021
