How to get things done as a new parent:
1. Do whatever you can before your baby is born
Whatever you think you’ll have time to do once your baby comes, you won’t. Perhaps pregnancy is nine months, so you’ll have time to get ready! Obviously, set up the nursery and anything else around the house you’ll need to make your life easier or better—replace light fixtures, towel rods, etc. And get any medical care you need: shots, checkups, etc. Of course, once your baby comes, you’ll have to do all sorts of things to meet their needs that you couldn’t have planned for before they were born.
2. When your baby is asleep, ask yourself what you’d regret not having done when they start crying and do it
In those…
What’s the most efficient way to make user-centered decisions about products? For example, how can you tell, without developing a product or feature, whether users will find it useful?
Say you have an existing chess app which lets players play against only the computer. Due to the popularity of The Queen’s Gambit, there’s a huge influx of novice players to your app, and you’re considering adding the ability to play against a person because you think it will be more engaging and educational for novices.
Let’s start with what I see as the fundamental theorem of UX design:
The more…
When my spouse and I enrolled our kid at a cooperative preschool, as parents (“users”) we identified the experience of families new to the school as one that could be improved. Although everyone was friendly, they all seemed to know each other and what to do when co-oping (helping out in their child’s classroom on a rotating basis). We didn’t. For example, at school play dates in public parks over the summer, we didn’t even know which kids went to the school, or how to start talking with their parents. An orientation meeting designed to familiarize us with school logistics…
Jeremy Monat
Product manager and software developer focused on user experience, interaction design, databases, and desktop applications.
