Anticipatory design and UX for scale

This past week, I had the good fortune of live user-testing three wildly different prototype concepts for an upcoming product in our biggest market. My current employer’s mission statement is to make the internet free for the next billion users. But how do we go about doing this when the feedback we’re getting about the product is on the scale of a few two to ten thousand users?

One big takeaway for me was to incorporate anticipatory design principles into our thinking. At its core, it involves intelligently predicting what our users will want before they even know they want them. In India, our biggest market, smartphone usage is quite different from the United States. Firstly, Android reigns supreme, with low-cost smartphones dominating the market with specialty phone features per device. Secondly, the line between apps and the internet is extremely blurred. Users we spoke to often couldn’t differentiate between a web app accessed through a web browser and a physical app installed on their device.

The smartphone explosion in India came rapidly and suddenly, entirely skipping the era of going to the app marketplace and downloading an app onto your phone, and going straight to readily-available web apps accessed right from a web browser. Designing for the next billion in a market like this involves careful consideration of what we think people will want in six months to a year from now, and proactively designing for it. Will they care more about privacy and security or faster browsing and download speeds? Will they want to have dedicated apps for everything or would they rather have a customizable browser homepage with quick links to all their frequently visited web apps? Do they want a highly personalized experience tailored for them or just a giant basket of options from which they pick and choose what they want?

Anticipatory design plays a big role here in designing the systems first. We’re tracking user behavior and measuring all sorts of metrics from revenue to retention. Once we have the foundation in place to know what our users will expect, we can start working our way towards it. We see the mountain in the distance that we need to get to, but we need to build the railroads and bridges first. Anticipatory design involves clearing the fog and mist so that everyone on the team has a clear view of that mountain.

As for the scale involved, it’s a tough process of straight up ignoring user feedback. In the excellent post about scaling Pinterest, they talk a lot about the complaints they were hearing from their current users and how they did nothing about it intentionally. The ideology was that if they tried to focus on the issues of the very vocal minority, they would never be able to focus on growth. Instead of fixing the little annoyances that their hardcore audience so desperately wanted, Pinterest instead looked to making the product more accessible to wider audiences. And it worked. They focused on what people wanted from a product like Pinterest, and built that. Had they gone the other way and built all the power user features that the select few were requesting, they would have never been able to scale the way they did.

These are two of my biggest lessons learned so far working at a product company so laser-focused on getting the next billion users online. Learning how to built and iterate on designs to predict what people want before they even know they want it, and knowing what kinds of user feedback to ignore in order to stay focused on the real goal is absolutely crucial to success. It’s easy to lose track of the mountain in the distance and get distracted by the rolling hills and beautiful meadows in the foreground. It’s okay to acknowledge them as you pass by, but in order to get to the mountain, you must ignore these temptations and keep laying down the tracks for the destination.