What’s Wrong in Texas? The Case for User-Centered Design in Product Management
“What does product management have to do with finance and healthcare?” I have been challenged by some derivative of that question about fifteen times in the last month alone. Over the past few months family members, at least the adult ones, have been asking about my interest in financial and health wellness platform product management. These conversations can be tough, so I have started to come prepared.
Explaining how product managers navigate technical impediments, product design, and business needs often drives my adult family to the children’s table. Instead of becoming a human job posting, I have been telling stories about product management success and failure. Since most of my family are physicians, I rely on some non-traditional stories relatable to their professions. A recent study in Obstetrics & Gynecology may be my favorite. If you prefer not to read a medical study, you can catch up on all the facts the way I did by reading this Popular Science article.
Quick Overview
The digital death registration system in Texas allows people filing death records to select pregnancy status from a dropdown menu with “not pregnant in the past year” directly above “pregnant at the time of death”. Putting two opposite selections in the same font and color directly atop one another was a bad idea. This poor design opened the door for user error to the tune of a potential 56 erroneous “pregnant at the time of death” selections out of 74 total selections in 2012 alone. In other words, over 75% of data involved with Texas’s pregnancy death statistics is potentially flawed.
Simple errors become catastrophic when they undermine trust in a product.
Public health practitioners, regulators, and academics who rely on this data are now forced to question the validity of their own work. Errors like this may seem trivial at first, but over time they undermine the integrity of products, brands, and institutions. In this case a faulty product has been collecting flawed data for twelve years.
How Product Management Can Help
Simple errors become catastrophic when they undermine trust in a product. Financial wellness platforms and health wellness platforms are particularly at risk since customers are hyper-protective of information those platforms collect and leverage. Make one mistake that negatively impacts user data and your entire product could be abandoned. Good product managers ensure that these types of mistakes don’t make it into production. Good product management makes any system run smoothly. Even electronic death registration.
This explanation satisfies 90% of my family members. Some press for more by asking “what could the product manager have done?” That requires a little more detail on the role product managers play in product design.
Product Managers and Product Design
The Texas death registration product’s most glaring flaws could have been improved with better user-centered design. To that end product managers should ensure that design patterns are intuitive to key user groups. User experience testing can help teams identify intuitive design elements. Product managers should partner with designers and business analysts to perform such testing.
User experience testing starts with surveying users and conducting interviews. Product managers should also observe how users interact with a prototype. After all, anyone in their right mind would tell you they can select the right answer from a dropdown menu, but that’s clearly not the case. The Texas product team could have practiced rigorous user experience testing by identifying key groups of users who complete electronic death registrations and observing their use of a prototype dropdown interface. These tests would have put the product team in a position to identify potential user interface issues and adjust accordingly.
To minimize the possibility of user error, the Texas product manager could have also implemented user-centered design best practices. The Texas product team overlooked a design best practice when they failed to scramble the dropdown menu so that opposite selections are not listed atop one another with the same font and color. To avoid similar mistakes teams should develop and follow a checklist of best practices specific to their product during builds and updates. The product manager should ensure such best practice documentation exists and is followed.
By now I often see nods of approval indicating my family member has learned a bit more about product management, at least from the product design perspective. I would love to explain the role of product mangers in overcoming technical impediments or ensuring business needs are met. But lucky for them, and you, I know that trying to cover the full breadth of product management would overwhelm us. We can explore technical and business factors of product management in other articles.
