more good, less bad

Please enjoy but do not tease my illustrations. I worked very hard on them.

TL;DR

• Many think more good and less bad are the same thing

• The fact is, they're not not the same thing, but thinking of them as such can be unproductive

• In product development, we don't want to think of making things more good and less bad as involving the same approach

• We can help expand our thinking beyond a mean that can miss the story, and go into the detail

• Doing so is imperative for building great user experiences

I wanted to talk about the difference between ‘more good’ and ‘less bad’. You can think of them as similar and not be entirely wrong, but it can lead to unhelpful ways of thinking. Especially for people in charge of products

If you asked most people, you would likely find that they’d tell you that making something more good and making something less bad are the same. Let’s imagine an axis with bad on the left, and good to the right. For most people, the mental model of more good or less bad would simply be to shift the subject further towards “Good”. The only difference might be that we perceive making something less bad as starting closer to the “Bad” side of the axis, and making something more good as starting closer to the “Good” side of the axis. That would look a little something like this:

I don’t disagree with this. It might lead us to define making something “more good” or “less bad” as “anything that shifts the subject to the right on the axis”.

While I don’t have an issue with this definition per se, I do have an issue with what this kind of thinking results in. Primely, my issue is with the constriction that this definition, and the axis mental model that follows from it shown above, leads to. It causes narrow thinking about complex things. Things can suddenly only possess one place on the axis, and are either more good or less bad after being changed depending on their initial position on the axis.

A good example of the mental constraint this leads to would be for me to ask you:

If less bad and more good are the same thing, how can I make a good product “less bad”?

The product is already good, so in the line of thinking outlined above, we could only make it ‘more good’. This would be by shifting it from its already relatively good position on the axis, to a stronger position to the right of its old point on the axis.

In truth, nothing is so unidimensional. Everything is multi-faceted. And we must think about them as such. There can be many facets of a subject - some good, some bad.

There are two resulting ways to rethink our mental model. We either break down our singular point on the axis into several points describing each facet, or we group all the good things and all the bad things and average those out, placing them on respective goodness and badness axes.

In product, we often go for the latter. We have features that we know our users enjoy, and we try and spend a good amount of time on making those better to delight our users. But we also spend a good amount of our time working on fixing all the issues our users have raised that are making their experiences with our product bad.

We make our product more good when we work on the former, and we make it less bad when we work on the latter. You can think of this mental model like this:

The next time you’re planning resource and looking at the backlog, try thinking about these two axes and how you’re balancing out making your product more good while also making it less bad. 

Dependent on where you are in your product development lifecycle, or the magnitude of the issues and therefore the places your product is currently sitting on both of those axes, one might take priority over the other.

More good. Less bad. Similar thrust, different endeavour.