If you have never heard of OXO kitchen products, let me tell you about them. They are a company that has kept human factors in mind when they designed their award winning kitchen products. And if ever there was a place for good product design, it is in the kitchen.

The American Sam Farber founded OXO, a manufacturer that develops kitchen utensils with out-sized and comfortable knobs and handles. Mr. Farber noticed that manufacturers seemed to only considered cost and not usability. He realized most of the products available were cheap, poorly manufactured junk and rightly so because people expected the junk they bought to last only a few months. Then customers would replace them a year or so later. In the long run, people came to expect junk and so they lived with this throw-away behaviour. But not Sam Farber. He thought people wanted better than this. He believed people would pay for products that were not only simple to use but designed around the needs of the user and were high quality. Anything less was an assault on the user’s intelligence and capabilities.

Thinking of the users first

Remember those old clunky can openers? If you are one of those fortunate to not know these old devices, at some point you would have hurt your hands trying to open a can. I remember it happening to me many times. Few of these old clunkers are still made because Farber changed the marketplace for good with his innovative design. Farber believed people deserved better - and this is what he came up with. The OXO description of this product:

The design incorporated plump, resilient handles for twist and push-pull tools like knives and peelers, while squeeze tools like can openers had hard handles. All handles were oval in cross section, to better distribute forces on the hand and enhance grip, even for wet hands. The measuring cups and spoons featured large, high-contrast markings for visibility.

Customers paid a bit more for this product but they were happy to pay it to get good design and a product they would enjoy using. Cheap kitchen utensils were not cheap in the long run as the user typically injured their hands and they had to replace the can opener frequently.

What about product documentation?

Documentation, like can openers can be simple to use and provide to users information they need efficiently and effectively. The cost of junk documentation is usually frustrated customers or even lost customers. Documentation reflects on the reputation of a company. For example, companies whose only products are APIs, success depends almost entirely on the quality of the documentation. So documentation is not an add-on, something that is thrown together at the last minute to ensure all the boxes are checked in the packing list. It is critical for the success of the product. Yet some companies treat documentation as a clunky old can opener without a single thought for the consumer They say to themselves, and even to technical writers, “well, people never read the documentation anyway.”

In fact product users do read the documentation. If a user has a problem with the product, they will open the documentation and expect a solution to the problem they are having with the product. Simplicity, usability and quality baked into documentation implies anticipating user’s issues. How do I use the product? What can the product do? Give me a quick tutorial to guide me through the basic steps. Give me more complex examples. What are the limitations of the product? What do all these terms mean?

All this should be organized in a way that is accessible to different types of users. Like the OXO can opener, it should be comfortable to use, do the job well and make the user want to return to it for more. And achieving this takes time and good planning.

Make good documentation a high priority

The moral of the story? First, usability is not about keeping costs down and matching specs based on a general idea of customer requirements, although that is important. It is based on an insight, an idea that it can be done better - and doing it. Sam Farber saw a clear need to improve on the usability of an existing product and was not satisfied until it was designed and executed properly. It wasn’t just done well. It was done exceedingly well. And that means taking the time to do it right and placing quality as a high priority.

We can be satisfied with junk and many people are because they do not expect quality. As Sam Farber demonstrated, usability matters and he changed the way we think about kitchen utensils. The same can be said about documentation but only if product managers see documentation as an integral part of the product and not a last minute item to ensure all the boxes are checked. In my experience, this is slowly becoming the norm and managers see the docs as critical for the success of the product. The lesson of the OXO can opener and Sam Farber’s principles are well intrenched in the software development world now. We have come a long way since I first started writing documentation back in 1994. And that is good news for everyone, especially product users.