Users Rarely Care About Your Company
There’s a running joke in the HBO series Silicon Valley about how every tech company wants to make the world a better place. The show’s main antagonist, Gavin Belson, goes so far as to say, “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”
Too many products labor the point: telling their users about their mission or vision, which is about how they’re trying to change the world. Please don’t do this because users simply don’t care. Products are useful for what they let users do. This pattern of too much information is a symptom of a lack of objectivity.
If a user has installed your dating app, for example, the chances are that they have some clear goals in mind: some basic “jobs to be done” that involve setting up a profile and meeting people. They don’t want a multi-screen onboarding wizard that tells them how...
