Coded, Tested, Delivered!

On a recent flight, this message popped up on the screen in front of me:

“Your friend in seat 42H has invited you to watch the movie together”

(I was expecting that, since that “friend” was my wife, seated next to me)

… “with 0 other person”.

This silliness is highly visible but minor. The “watch together” feature, which has a high-value potential, is an illustrative example of many things gone wrong.

I suppose the most common use case is this: a couple or a family wants to watch a movie. They’re already seated together. They’ve agreed on a movie, and want to get started.

The feature’s actual experience is not so personal. Instead, it’s like a passenger choosing a movie and roping in random passengers. They can, technically, invite anyone on the plane (including accidentally).

Let’s say that’s not an issue, and they’ve started watching together. Now, one of them wants to skip the ads, pause the movite, or re-watch a scene.

Nothing in the system makes it easy to continue together. How do my wife and I solve this? We sync manually to the same location and say “Ready, set, go!”

A company made this entertainment system. What has given rise to these product problems?

The obvious culprit is their process. Whether they used Agile or Waterfall, it might have lacked two basic activities:

Before development: a bit of analysis to identify the most common use case or two
After development: a bit of exploratory testing (“I’ll pretend to be traveling with my wife and invite her to watch a movie together”)

But what if their official process was actually okay?

In this case, they have a leadership/culture problem: decisions made during the feature’s lifecycle resulted in designing, developing, and releasing it like this.

This is just one example of the large gap that sometimes exists between “coded, tested, delivered” and actual user value and experience.

Is your product exposed to this risk? Let’s talk.