People who get to know us often find our mission statement intriguing if not humorous. It is to “end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology.™”

Most of us have had the experience of being tortured by a piece of software and we think it just has to be that way.

It does not.

The most common form of suffering in our industry is that which is experienced by end-users of software systems and products that they must use every day and which they had no voice in designing. This voice-less community typically has this software foisted upon them.

So how do we alleviate this suffering?  What we say at Menlo is that there is something fundamentally missing in the software process. It is the link that connects this voice-less community with homo logicus. Homo logicus are the software engineers who understand how the computer works. The typical user does not care how the computer works. Let me give you a simple example.

We’ve all had the experience when working on an important document or presentation, that suddenly the lights went out or the computer crashed and fear was struck into our hearts because we are now at risk of having lost all the hard work we’ve put in.

Why?

Homo logicus would explain to us that since we have not pressed the “Save” button, the contents of Random Access Memory had not been transferred to the hard drive. Most of us at this point acknowledge that yes, in fact, we are a stupid user.

We are here to free you from that, forever. It wasn’t stupid user, it was stupid design.

There is no reason that a modern computer should ever lose more than one keystroke, ever. Homo logicus would explain that that would make the computer work very hard, and that if we just teach users to save often, they won’t have this problem.

To truly alleviate this pain and eliminate the disconnect between the end users and homo logicus, we need another set of people to bridge the gap. These people need skills not only in observing human behavior, but also of empathy, sympathy, and compassion.

At Menlo we give them a special name: High-Tech Anthropologists®.

Some teams take a different approach. They advocate having the user always in the room. We did not adopt this approach based on two concerns: 1) users that are willing to sit in the room with a technical team all day long are probably themselves “closet programmers”, 2) even if they are “regular users” the Stockholm Syndrome will kick in and they will begin to identify with their captors.

There’s probably a far more important reason though, to observe users in their native environment as our High-Tech Anthropologists® do. This is because most of the information we need to collect is non-verbal.

Let me illustrate with an example from our work here at Menlo.

Our team was engaged by the local county government to design the user experience for the people who man the desk of the County Vital Records Office. People go to this office to obtain copies of things such as birth certificates and death certificates. I happened to see the final designs just before the presentation to the end users. I laughed when I saw them and said something like, “You can’t be serious. Why are there pictures of idyllic beach scenes on the home page of this application?” Our High-Tech Anthropologists® assured me that this was very important. I asked them why.

They described the environment of the County Clerks who handled these requests and when they followed them back to their desks, they noticed the picture post cards on the wall. They wondered if this group was in a travel club. They said, “Nope. We’ve never been to any of these places…”

Why the post cards then?

They went on to explain that as public employees, the public often comes in with the attitude that “I pay my taxes, therefore you work for ME.” And they’re not always nice. They said they used the post cards to calm themselves and to think about being in a far away pleasant place after these stressful interactions. Thus, our team decided to add this therapeutic tool to the screens the clerks would be using when talking to their customers.  The clerks looked at our team, some of them with a tear welling up in the corner of their eye, and commented, “No one has ever listened to us like this before. Thank you.”

The beautiful thing is, of course, we didn’t listen. We observed. We used empathy, sympathy, and compassion to design a great user experience.