Learning from Mistakes

I ranted lately about last Google Reader upgrade, but I’m also curious what their product management will do now. There are more sins in the upgrade, not only completely ridiculous page refreshing. My friend commented on the new Reader: “I used to navigate it with eyes shut and now I’m feeling odd – everything is different.” I have to agree. I used to navigate in Reader with “k” (open previous post), “n” (go to next post without opening it) and arrows (scan through longer posts). Now I have two bad choices: expanded view (where “n” opens the post and marks it as read) and list view (where arrows don’t work). It’s a lose-lose scenario.

When I look at those issues I think it’s quite a challenge for Reader’s product management. Coming back to F5 story – they’ll have two groups of users soon: conservative F5 users, who want it to work like anywhere else and some F5 early adopters, who will come to like new extravagant F5 functionality. They’ll have to upset one of those groups (I hope the latter) either leaving refresh feature as it is or changing it back to standard. I’m looking forward for their decision.

Another thing is if Google learn from their own mistakes. By now I’m sure they don’t learn from their colleagues from different product lines – exactly the same issues, which I see now in Google Reader, were in GMail and then Blogger. I know, different locations, formerly different companies and so on. But I’m the customer and I don’t care. They’ve chosen to make it one brand – I didn’t force them to. However, maybe they can learn from their own mistakes within the product. We’ll see.

An example comes from Microsoft. I use live.com very occasionally. After my first contact with the site I noticed that they choose to display search results in different way than anyone else. Instead of pages with fixed amount of results they proposed one big list where more results were being displayed while you were scrolling down the list. Odd. I asked some people about their opinion and generally all agreed that it wasn’t a good idea. Everyone used to see search result grouped to pages, then someone wanted to change their habit.

However a couple of days ago I noticed that live.com learnt it the hard way and changed interface to more conservative. I think they received a lot of feedback connected with the UI and decided that they actually had done a mistake. I wonder how Google Reader team will manage their issue.

When I see all those examples I always wonder why they have to do usability testing after releasing the product with their users as testers. Wouldn’t it be wiser to spend some money to make hard-core usability testing before the release? Little “beta” label on the logo doesn’t resolve the user irritation issue (and neither Reader nor live.com has the label). Yeah, I believe they actually do usability tests before deploying the new version, but still I have no clue how they could overlook F5 in Reader.

Tagged as: google reader, live.com, product management, project management, software design, usability issues