On empathy and delivery

I hadn't intended on writing on this subject this week, it was going to be about a personal consumer travel site bugbear and my prediction for the future, but I'm going to look at empathy again. I've written about empathy and solutions with an eye on the development process and buying behaviours and usability looking at how the development and user needs might be different.


So, what triggered this post? I like to use the Timehop app, which displays your history on the same day in the past across social media, and I like their mini-features like snow animations at Christmas. This Valentine's day opening up the app presented me with two options, would I like my real life on this day in social media and phone photos? Or would I prefer not to see it?

Out of interest I chose "NOPE" and was presented with a fake timeline of kittens and puppies, with the option to go see my real Timehop at the end.

There are a couple of things I liked about this. The first was the obvious emptahy of the potential impact of such an emtional day. The second might seem a bit strange, but the use of regular updates that have become common and Timehop seem to use to deliver date targeted features such as these.

I have sat in various meetings on continous integration/delivery in the past and they have typically talked about ease of development, lower overheads, ease of understanding etc etc. All very good reasons but a bit insular.

I think features like this show how with good product management you can experiement with features that could be useful or react to missing use cases, perhaps ones like this that are time specific and won't make the cut for a March launch and they won't trigger for nearly a year. Who knows, maybe this is precursor to adding in user selected significant dates ... or hiding posts containing certain subjects.

Maybe I'm just easily impressed but I liked this, it was unexpected, it was humorous and got my attention. Features like this keep the app feeling fresh. I'm glad they haven't just got stuck in a spiral of adding more connections ... "Connect to JIRA to see which issues you set to ready for QA last year!" or "Connect to Salesforce and see which prospect you cold called 4 years ago!"

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