I often encourage people to think holistically.
Holistic thinking is to think about a thing not in isolation, but to consider the wider context and to think through how others experience it.
Our customers don’t care at all about internal work. It’s invisible to them. They expect that everything is instant. If it’s not, consider their perspective when talking with them:
If you see a long email thread, to you it might be another day at work, but for sure for the customer it’s a nightmare. Go out of your way to fix it, even if it’s not your role.
Customers don’t decide to go to feature X and do work there. They experience Remote. That means that if they want to know how to lower Marcelo’s salary, they might go to: compensation management, Marcelo’s profile, or even somewhere else! We don’t want customers to have to search.
Solution: First, don’t make the customer think. Do the work for the customer. If that’s not possible, be where they are likely to look. Adding links and references in other places in our app is free (!!!). It’s better to give full context in multiple places than adding a bunch of links, but this is highly dependent on the actual context.
When building products, we often assume our customers have the same mental model as we have. We assume that they understand what we’re showing.
However, our audience is all sorts of people from all sorts of places. Not all our customers understand what any particular feature is, no matter what you call it.
Solution: Create the mental model! Either make the interface reflect the underlying model (e.g. if you have stages through which data goes through, show all the stages with arrows), or explain it explicitly (”A hire goes through the stages interviewing > offer > hired”).