Product managers write terrible requirements, littered with buzz words, ambivalent language, and non-specific performance parameters. They read like somewhat-technical marketing hype. And developers have to make sense of the requirements. They complain, “I cannot program to these requirements.” And theyre right.

via On Reqs and Specs: The Roles and Behaviors for Effective Product Definition.

One of our most popular articles, John & I explore the difference between reqs and specs, and why most teams need a designer.

Cindy Alvarez writes,

Many designers do not (fully) use the product they are designing. Sometimes this is due to laziness on the designer’s part; much more frequently company culture and the product management/engineering organizations are to blame.

The other reason is that, in many organizations, designers are brought into the process too late.

Folks who have attended our Requirements That Work seminar have heard us advocate for the role of the product designer. And you don’t have to look past the iPad to see what an incredible difference (good) design makes. Not just user-interface but user-interaction. It’s in the responsiveness of the device, the speed of the feedback, the level of integration throughout the experience. Maybe you feel the same about a device that you own. And think of some of those applications that you use that could clearly benefit from a better design.

Designers look beyond the feature set to the experience. They’re  critical team resource. Do you have one on your team?

Read more in Why are so many products poorly designed? (Part 1).

See also Product Design: Bridging the Gap Between Product Management & Development.

From the second we turned it on, the user experience was astonishingly bad. Want to activate your phone? Take the battery out, write down a series of minuscule numbers that you find on the phone and on the SIM card, then enter them into Verizon’s barely-functional site. Once you’ve got it hooked up, navigate the opaque first time setup, if it doesn’t crash while you’re entering your information (it did – twice). Once you’re done with the setup, enjoy the apps that Verizon and Samsung think you should use: a terrible golf game, a Samsung branded Twitter client, Verizon’s half-baked navigation app.

via Why My Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.

What’s the new user experience for your products? Does it work great right out of the box, or is your customer forced to mess with the installation to get a working solution.

This article focuses on the disaster for one model of the Android phone while referencing a delightful experience with another model. And that’s one of the challenges of that space: the carrier interferes between vendor and user, adding their pointless crap. Stuff neither the vendor nor the user wanted.

In their effort to “have more features” (or a more branded experience perhaps), they have added difficulty and complexity–and destroyed the user experience.

Many products do 70% of everything; the great ones do 100% of some things.

Which is yours?

(PS. This isn’t an operating system rant. It’s about user experience and getting the feature set right).