We’re all taught to put the user on the first place. It’s fair. Whatever you work on should solve user problem.
So what's the matter with designing for users?
Imagine you have your product launched and you have some active users. You make your product better, polish it, you’re doing user interviews and get analytics.
The users love your product but the audience doesn’t grow. It feels like your product isn’t good enough, or what does it mean exactly? What are you doing wrong here? The user-first strategy.
I think the user-first philosophy as an obsolete. It used to work but not anymore. It does not consider the growth.
So long story short, business needs are much more important than user needs.
Growing business pays salary and makes the difference.
But don't get me wrong, business goals can and should align with user needs. When they do, it creates a win-win situation. For instance, Bic pens are great in many ways: same quality over decades, super cheap, just a pen with no stupid extras. They benefit from producing a pen for the users.
So how about some nice, convincing examples that are in the air.
- A SaaS product needs to acquire the niche and they need the product to grow and hove more features. UX is good but shipping quicker is more important. Business needs dictate the pace. I’d say Deel is one of such. Their features were not very user-friendly but there were many released day by day that were important for the business growth.
- Cars now have big tablets that are hard to control on the go. Business says the car must be ultra modern and look different. Users hate it (you can google for the surveys). It doesn’t mean the business goes stupid, the really sell a lot of such cars.
- My old Macbook Pro 2017 was a disaster but a commercial success. They needed loud features. Thin design (bad cooling), new thin keyboard (broke 3 times on my machine), and many other points. It is a commercial product and they moved aside user needs. I mean what user expects a thinner machine with a “Pro” badge on it, if it doesn’t cool good?
- Marketplaces want to sell more. They want the purchases to be impulse. The want you to buy, buy, and buy. Over and over again. And it’s kind of fair, this does match the business goals and it’s opposite to the user needs. In such type of business, you can’t compete if you don’t focus on the business needs.
👹 There are super bads. Will post them soon.