Okay, here’s my attempt at a blog post, mimicking the requested style:
My Deep Dive into Jay Guidinger’s Stuff
Alright, so I was messing around the other day, trying to figure out some new angles for my workflow, and I stumbled across some mentions of Jay Guidinger. Never heard of the dude before, but he seemed to have some interesting approaches to, well, stuff. So, I decided to jump in and see what the hype was all about.
First thing I did was google his name. Duh. Tons of stuff came up, mostly related to his work in like, product design and strategy. That’s cool and all, but I wanted to get my hands dirty, not just read some high-level fluff.
Then I dug deeper. I found a bunch of his talks on YouTube. The quality varied, some were just phone recordings of him speaking at conferences, but others were properly produced. I started watching the good ones.
What really grabbed me was his focus on user empathy. I mean, I thought I was being user-focused, but he takes it to another level. He talked about really understanding the motivations and frustrations of the people using your product, not just looking at analytics. It sounds obvious, but the way he explained it just clicked.
So, I decided to try some of his techniques myself. He mentions doing these “contextual inquiries,” which is basically shadowing users while they’re actually using the thing you’re working on. Sounds kinda stalker-ish, but the idea is to observe their natural behavior.
I figured I’d start small. I picked a feature on my own project that I knew was a bit clunky. Then, I asked a colleague if I could just watch them use it for a few minutes. They were a little weirded out at first, but they agreed.
And man, I saw things I would have NEVER seen just looking at the data. They were constantly clicking the wrong buttons, getting confused by the labels, and generally just struggling. It was painful to watch, honestly.
After that, I made some quick changes based on what I saw. I rearranged the buttons, rewrote some of the labels, and added a little bit of helper text.
Then, I asked the same colleague to try it again. Night and day! They breezed through it with no problems. They even said, “Wow, this is much better!”
Seriously, it was that simple. Just watching someone use the feature and making a few tweaks based on their struggles.
I’m definitely going to be doing more of these contextual inquiries in the future. Jay Guidinger’s onto something, for sure. It’s a bit time-consuming, but the payoff is huge. It forced me to really step back and see my product through the eyes of the user.
So, yeah, that’s my Jay Guidinger experience. It was a good learning experience, and I think it’s something anyone working on a product should try. Go check out some of his talks. You might be surprised what you learn.
