Ben Barden

product management

Software quality: why you shouldn’t ignore the small things

by Leave a Comment

When your product to-do list (aka the product backlog) is very long, with “urgent” items or requests from your biggest or most demanding users, the natural path is to focus on the high value work.

New features that could bring in new users or retain existing ones. Major bugs. Quick wins.

Everywhere I’ve worked, and in fact in most software projects I’ve heard of, there’s always more to do than you can actually get through. You can’t do everything, so you have to prioritise what to work on next.

As part of gathering feedback from users, QAs, or your own product review cycles, you’ll sometimes identify issues or potential tweaks which, in the grand scheme of things, seem very minor. Perhaps there’s a small layout bug on iOS. A little-used setting doesn’t work for a small number of users. An old page that hardly anybody goes to doesn’t look right with a recent design overhaul. Or a page is retired and removed from the navigation links – but it’s still accessible if you visit it directly.

I’ve heard numerous excuses for not dealing with minor changes such as the above. It’s not important. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. We’re too busy. Etc. However, if you ignore all of these small issues, they can build up and collectively give users the impression that the product is being neglected.

It’s a broken window situation.

In The Pragmatic Programmer, there’s a section called Software Entropy that mentions broken windows. I’d like to highlight this quote:

Don’t leave “broken windows” (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a “Not Implemented” message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you’re on top of the situation.

If something’s broken, fix it. If it’s not used anymore, remove it. To help with this, gather feedback to see if users are finding pain points that you’re not aware of. Use analytics to see which parts of the product are being used.

Don’t ignore the minor things. While one small UX quirk might not make much difference if you fix it, lots of UX issues in the same area of the product can really annoy your users. Leaving this unresolved can make software feel awkward and frustrating to use, or just plain broken.

Is that the kind of product you want?

How I prioritise small requests alongside project work

by Leave a Comment

Recently, I changed the way I prioritise new work requests and projects. Here’s what I’ve started doing.

Prioritising the product backlog

JIRA is our central system for development requests. There’s one project for smaller requests: the “BAU” as I call it, which is anything that takes 2 days dev time or less. Except for urgent requests, which we will drop other work to look at, anything in JIRA is allocated a business area via a custom field.

Each week, I export a list of all open tickets, filtered by area. One or two people in each area indicate their Priority 1 and Priority 2 tasks, and those go into the queue. We also prioritise our internal work, such as changes to the core product, and improvements to our technical stack.

We won’t complete all of the prioritised tasks every week – but it allows us to see what the priorities are.

I believe it’s important for all areas of the business to be included in the prioritisation process. Nobody should feel that their area is being ignored. Allowing each business owner to define their priorities can prevent this issue.

Prioritising the projects

Instead of starting yet another spreadsheet, for projects I decided to use pen and paper. I ordered a stack of 1000 plain white 5×3 record cards and a pack of Sharpies.

I started by writing one project on each card, and laying it all out on the table (literally). Staff involved in the meeting can see all the known projects, ask what they are, and identify anything that may be missing.

Once all projects are defined, we agree what’s the next priority. This makes it very clear which project will be worked on next – and also what won’t be. Showing the number of projects can make it very clear if there’s a capacity issue. There’s only so much resource, so we can’t work on every project simultaneously.

Does it work?

As this is a very new process I’m trialling, it’s too early to say how effective it is. I’ll write a follow-up post on this.

6 pitfalls with user feedback

by Leave a Comment

Getting feedback from users can be an invaluable way to determine how your product is viewed by its audience. But it’s important to understand some of the pitfalls with user feedback before you start allowing comments to shape your product strategy.

1. Not everyone likes change

There’s a running joke that whenever Facebook changes something, people are up in arms for a week or two – maybe not even that. After that initial period, we get used to the change. Sometimes, negative feedback may be purely down to the fact we don’t like change. If you’re going to ask for feedback, don’t do it immediately after a big release.

2. People are more likely to give negative feedback

Negative feedback can be a good way to measure if a recent change has annoyed users. Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t give any feedback at all – including those who are happy with a change. Don’t take negative feedback to mean you need to reverse a recent change.

3. One-off comments may not help anyone else

If one person asks for something, don’t jump on that task immediately. If it’s a good idea and you can make a change as a result of their feedback, it’s something to consider. However, if you react to every comment without considering if it’s right for the product, you may end up with a product with a sprawling feature set, and that pleases an extremely narrow group of users – the most vocal ones.

4. New designs need time to bed in

A new design can attract a lot of comments – most of them are purely down to opinion. Issues such as elements overlapping, fonts being too small, or scaling not working across different screen sizes are important things to fix. Beyond that, aesthetics shouldn’t be up for debate.

5. People don’t know what they want

If you ask 100 users of your product what they want from it, the collective feedback may be a laundry list of missing features. In fact, your best change could be something that nobody even thought of. You are in control of product strategy – find things that people didn’t even know they wanted. Make the product quicker and easier to use.

6. Surveys can help – but be careful what you wish for

A user feedback survey can give you a limited set of feedback on the questions of your choosing. But don’t ask for things you don’t want to do. “Should we build an app?” is a pointless question if you have no intention of building one.

City AM: Homepage/Category redesign

by 1 Comment

Note: This is a backdated post, originally published in March 2015.

Since joining City AM in June 2014, we’ve introduced a series of gradual changes to the site layout.

The main changes can be grouped into a few areas:

  • a new header
  • a tiled layout
  • getting the homepage and category pages to match
  • mobile-first
  • a refreshed sidebar with compelling content and greater variety

Barring a few tweaks, the theme has stayed roughly the same.

What did we change, and why did we make those changes?

New header

The previous header was quite compact, but it felt quite claustrophobic – there wasn’t any space for additional categories.

The header used on City AM in 2014.

We wanted to incorporate the “Business with personality” tagline, make the subcategories accessible, and show the user their current position within the site. We also had an additional set of links to add to the top. Later, we introduced the “FTSE bar” and trending tags.

The new header on City AM, added in March 2015.

As part of the layout changes, we also refined the look and feel. The social icons, search box and the navigation bar were all updated to feel more unified.

Tiled layout

The previous homepage layout incorporated a wide first column containing a lead story with headline and image, followed by an image/headline stream of content. Alongside this was a narrow second column containing text-only headlines of opinion pieces.

The homepage layout on City AM prior to March 2015.

This didn’t maximise the available space, and it was quite text-heavy. There were also several design elements we wanted to clean up; namely, the abundance of grey lines, and the double red arrows.

We decided to introduce a tiled layout:

The homepage layout on City AM from March 2015

This took a while to get right. The increased emphasis on images brought the page to life, but it has required a greater focus on selecting good images for every story. The introduction of subtle “furniture” helped to differentiate between content pieces; coloured labels such as “New”, “Opinion” and “Shares: xx” draw attention to certain content, while dates and author names add a little more information and also break up the stream.

The lead story was the one place we felt that an intro paragraph and related links could be useful. Links aren’t always used, but the intro always appears. This gives greater focus to the lead story.

Positioning the headlines above or below the images took a few attempts. Having two columns means it’s possible for a long headline to create a lot of whitespace if its neighbour has a very short headline. We debated whether it was better to have space above the headline and keep the headline and image attached, or line up the top of every headline but potentially have space between the headline and image. The former worked better. The result is that there is a certain amount of tweaking that goes on to make the stream balanced – which means no four-line decks alongside one-line decks.

Homepage and category pages

The category pages originally had a different layout to the homepage. Take a look:

The City AM News category page, prior to March 2015

We didn’t feel the layout was particularly compelling. So we decided to reuse the tiled layout from the homepage:

The City AM News category page, revamped in March 2015

This was always the intention – the tiled layout was designed to suit any area. There are slight variations on a few special pages such as topic pages and company pages.

Mobile-first

A major focus throughout the work we did on the tiled layout was to put mobile first. We designed something that looks great on mobile, and scales up to tablet and desktop well.

Leaving out the lead story for space reasons, here’s how it looks on mobile:

The redesigned City AM news feed, viewed on mobile

I actually prefer it on mobile. This is perhaps my favourite part of the changes we made.

Sidebar

The sidebar is something we’ve changed a bit more than the rest of the layout:

  • redesigning the Newsletter signup box;
  • adding a “Data in Focus” box;
  • reworking the second homepage column into a new sidebar box – “The Forum”;
  • added images to “Most Read” and changed this to update more often;
  • when you reach the bottom of the sidebar, the ad and the Most Read box stick to the top.

Managing the changes

With so many changes to make, this would have been a big project if we tried to do everything at once. Instead, we took the approach of getting changes live as quickly as possible, so we could monitor any positive or negative effects on overall stats and conversions.

This gradual but steady cycle of changes allowed us to respond quickly when we wanted to make a change. This was essential due to the small development team. When resources are precious, you need to think carefully before jumping into a huge project – especially if it’s not clear if you will see benefits until you actually try it out.

As for the results, they’ve generally gone one of two ways:

  1. Fail, learn, adapt
  2. Succeed, learn, grow

Where we’ve seen no difference, we either gather more data or make a further change and monitor that instead.

Sometimes, you have to fail to succeed. As long as you learn, it’s all good.

Further reading

Following these changes, we did a full website redesign in March 2016. You can read about it here: Redesigning City A.M. – March 2016