It’s Time to ‘Sweat’ the Experience Details
I recently watched my wife attempt to install an app on her phone. The note-taking app is a great product, with good functionality once its up and running. It is, however, tough to install. I tried to help her and actually couldn’t get through the process myself without some coaching from the ‘online’ help desk. Plain and simple, it was a frustrating experience for both of us.
Here is my question to the app developers: “Have you ever watched someone try to install the app?” After all, the very best way understand if something works is to watch real live customers interact with the product – and then discuss, among team members, what needs to be improved. That clearly didn’t happen in this case.
If someone on the app team had done their homework, watched and asked what customers thought and then made the necessary changes, it would have made our lives so much easier. Instead, we were met with 60 minutes of hassle.
To succeed in today’s world, with a mobile app or with any customer connection, you’ve got to sweat the experience details and understand what your customers are going through. Let’s call it the user experience, the customer experience, the customer connection, whatever: it’s the design of the experience on which you should focus.
Sure, you can leave it to chance and hope it works, but don’t count on it. You can’t expect the details to fall into place without first understanding what kind of experience your customer is going to have. If the very future of your company depends on delivering a great experience, then you have to care about it as much as, actually, more than, everyone else on the team.
Sweat the experience details to ensure success. The passion to learn what customers want most of all and how to give it to them means the difference between surviving and thriving.
Image courtesy of Google Images.
It’s probably past time for developers to think of the customer experience, but as David Platt explained in his amusing book, “Why Software Sucks,” developers like the user to see how their creation works. One amusing note, developers are 4x or so more likely to drive cars with manual transmissions than the general population.
I heard him at a Microsoft conference — he does a lot of work with them. Not sure it’s very successful, but he is an amusing guy.