The old adage is perhaps even more important today than when it was first said. With social media and how quickly people can praise or condemn a product it’s crucial that we get user interactions right.
As a developer I think I’m more guilty than most at assuming a piece of software is intuitive and easy to use. As I work with a new product you become familiar with how it’s meant to work. The little nuances become second nature and commonplace and it no longer feels like you’re being forced to do things in a certain way. End-users however, aren’t so forgiving.
If you’re creating something from scratch you can be forgiven if things aren’t perfect first time, though there is still no excuse for not properly testing on prospective customers. Whether through paper prototypes or cobbled together MVPs, you should see how customers interact with your product, what works, what they struggled with and perhaps what they even failed to notice. Then you refine and repeat.
With upgrades to existing functionality though there is no excuse.
Your customers already have an experience, there will be things they like and things the don’t like. This will obviously vary from person to person but there should be an overall consensus. But the most important thing to remember is that people resist change due to the fear of the unknown. That is why it is important to feel what they feel, experience what they experience — walk in their shoes.
In Room Y we’ve recently been doing some exploratory work around two separate topics — wine and fabrics. With the fabric example we’ve been told of an existing problem and we’re trying to come up with a viable solution. But rather than taking what we’ve been told for granted, we wanted to feel it for ourselves. To this end we ordered some fabric samples taking note of how the process felt from beginning to end. Some of the questions we asked ourselves were:
- What did the experience feel like?
- Was there adequate messaging throughout the journey and did we know what to do? What about out of stock items?
- How long did it take for the samples to arrive? Is this what we expected based on what we were told?
This was only an online journey, so we also have to consider what an in-store journey feels like and how does it compare to the online flow?
- Are we given the same amount of information in-store as we are online?
- Is the process more simple or more complicated?
One of the things that became clear is that there is more scope for errors during the in-store process and this is something we should look to improve whether it involves technology or not (technology isn’t always the answer, something as simple as a process change can have massive improvements).
Our customers aren’t always obvious
Looking at the scenario above you might think it’s pretty obvious who our customers are, but in this situation we actually have more than one type of customer. It would be easy to think of someone walking into our shops or ordering online as the only customer, but if they say they’re experiencing frustration when it comes to actually receiving their order e.g wrong samples etc. then it becomes obvious there is another part of the process failing. This is where our second customer would be the Partner responsible for picking the order.
How is our process failing them? They’re two sides to the same coin and to really improve the overall experience we need to look at both. What doesn’t work at this side of the journey? Again we can really only find this out by talking to those actually involved on the front-line and seeing first-hand where the frustration points are.
Work out who your customers are, speak to them and if possible walk in their shoes.
As I mentioned previously we were also looking at a process involving wines, and although it’s a hard job to do we have had to go buy a few bottles. We do remember the experience but that’s a story for another day!
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