Build Taste by Watching Adjacent Software
Develop design intuition by watching real people use OTHER products, not your own.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Software creators almost never see people use their products in the wild, and when they watch users of their OWN product they carry a bias that blinds them. Baxley's method: deliberately increase 'exposure hours' by observing mere mortals using adjacent and everyday software, which surfaces honest insights and builds the medium-level intuition that filmmakers, comedians, and musicians get from their venues.
Origin
Baxley's practice; the 'reality check' study is his, and he credits Guillermo Rauch (Vercell) with the phrase 'exposure hours.'
Core principles
- 01You have a psychological bias when watching people use your own product
- 02Adjacent products reveal what users truly value without your rooting-interest distortion
- 03Metrics are like raw radio-telescope data; watching users is looking at the night sky
- 04Software is a medium and you must study it the way filmmakers study film
- 05Software is everywhere (kiosks, POS, ATMs, rental-car dashboards), so opportunities abound
How to run it
- 1
Run a reality check on competitors' products
Hold a usability-style session but have subjects perform the task in OTHER products, not yours, and watch what matters to them.
Pro tip Baxley's checkout reality check revealed that shipping quote was almost as important to users as price, an insight his own-product bias would have hidden.
Watch out Watching people use your own product, you'll subconsciously root for success and miss the real friction.
- 2
Manufacture exposure hours in the wild
Go out of your way to observe strangers using everyday software: self-checkout at Target vs a worse grocery store, chip-card inserts, Apple Pay, rental-car dashboards.
Pro tip Compare a great implementation against a poor one of the same task to sharpen what 'good' feels like.
- 3
Study how people organize and use software generally
Look at how real users structure their phone home screens and which apps they actually use, to understand how humans process on-screen information.
Pro tip Baxley flips through his kids' friends' phones and asks for a tour of their home screen.
- 4
Treat metrics as feedback, never as the driver
Use numbers to evaluate decision quality and triangulate, but ground understanding in direct observation of humans.
Watch out Relying on metrics to understand the user level is like reading raw telescope data instead of looking at the sky.
In the wild
Redesigning a checkout system, Baxley ran a lab study but had subjects go through checkout in other products (eBay, Williams Sonoma, Amazon). Watching them on adjacent products removed the team's bias to see positives.
→ They learned a ton about checkout, including that ship quote is almost as important as price, something they likely would have missed observing their own product.
Common mistakes
Reaching senior levels without watching mere mortals use software
In a metrics-heavy era many designers never observe non-expert users, so they never build intuition for how humans process a screen.
Only ever observing your own product
Rooting interest and the desire to see positives distort what you notice; adjacent products give a cleaner read.
Is it for you?
Best for
Designers and PMs who want to build genuine product taste and understand real user behavior.
Not ideal for
Situations demanding rigorous quantitative causal measurement, where observation supplements rather than replaces data.
From the transcript
“we did what I called a reality check, which was we held a traditional usability style exercise in a lab”
“we had the subjects come through and go through checkout in other products”
“ship quote is almost as important as price”
“find mechanisms where you go out of your way to see people using software in real time”
“increase your exposure hours to people using our product”
From the episode
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond
Bob Baxley