A quote that all of us have heard multiple times is If You Build It, They Will Come. This has launched countless applications/websites/solutions over the past few decades and very few of them actually had people come and use it. But due to confirmational bias people only remember the successes and thus this quote is still used actively in Business schools and by the Startup community. The latest example of this was shared by @nixCraft earlier, where a person spent $300k on an app no one uses.
I’m about to lose my mind and my investor’s money.Developer swears it’s ‘technically perfect’ but I can’t get a single doctor to adopt it. Two years ago we raised a seed round to build a patient management app for primary care doctors. Hired this boutique dev shop, spent 18 months and $300k building what they call a “technically superior solution.” The app works flawlessly. Zero bugs, clean UI, integrates with major EHRs, HIPAA compliant, the whole nine yards. Our developers are genuinely proud of it. But here’s the problem: doctors hate it. We’ve demoed it to 50+ practices. Same feedback every time. “It’s nice but it doesn’t fit our workflow.” “Too many clicks.” “We already have a system that works.” Meanwhile I see these basic-looking apps with terrible UIs getting massive adoption because they solve one specific pain point really well. Starting to think we built the app WE wanted to build instead of what doctors actually needed. Like we got so caught up in making it technically impressive that we forgot to make it useful.
I am awestuck that they managed to spend 300k over 18 months without realizing that no one wanted their solution and then instead of trying to figure out why people don’t want their solution they stuck to their guns and lost even more money.
One of the first things I learnt when I started programming was that your job is to solve problems for the customer, not showcase amazing technology. (If you can do both then that’s awesome). If you look at the quote above, the part in Italics pretty much explains why this app failed. In short the creator was so busy creating a “technically superior solution” that they forgot to create an app that the user actually wanted.
Earlier in my carrier I had the opportunity to work with a NGO that was working with various startups to create technology to help blind people and something they said really stuck with me. He told me that most companies try to create a system that mimic’s how a person would see the world and then translate that into something that a blind person could use and most of these attempts failed miserably because that is not what blind users wanted. They wanted technology that allowed them to interact with the world using their way. We are so used to having the ability to see that we think that if a person can’t see then we need to create something that allows them to see. But that is not what the users are looking for so the tech failed. The one company that had a promising solution spent a good amount of time talking to the prospective users of their technology and then built a solution that addressed specific pain points. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay in touch with the team but I am sure they are doing well because they are solving user problems.
The world’s most awesome and superior technology is of no use if no one actually uses it. We have been trained to think of users as ‘necessary evil’ and their are thousands of jokes around that make fun of users as being somehow clueless and stupid, some oldies call them lusers (a play on the word losers and users). But keep in mind without these users the systems we create are of no use. If you are not solving a business problem (or user pain point) with your solution then you might as well not build it in the first place.
There is one caveat here, you should always find out what problem the user is trying to solve and not just build what the user is asking for without digging into it. A lot of times people will come to you and say that I need XYZ, but when you dig into the problem they are trying to solve you realize that a different solution would be more effective in solving that problem instead.
This is why we need people from the product team to work with the engineering team together to understand what the user wants and how best to deliver that to the user.
– Suramya