Customer Experience

Christmas, Reindeer and Apple

  • Tuesday, 27 December, 2005
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December 27, 2005, 8:32 pm

So it was with a tinge of guilt that I perpetuated the myth of Father Christmas on Saturday night. I lied to my two year old daughter. Not a small untruth but a big whopper. I told her that a large man was going to come down our chimney and give here presents. But the lie was not just in my words, it was in the whole experience. She left mince pies and beer out for Santa – no sherry in the house) and apples for the reindeer. And the following morning the beer was drunk, the pies scoffed, crumbs on the floor and the apples had large bites taken from them. And she took it hook line and sinker. “Wow! Thank-you Santa” India shouted up the chimney.

It was the apples that completed the experience “didn’t you hear the reindeer on the roof last night mummy?” And later in the day another Apple experience. Lindsey got an iPod Nano. Like India’s Christmas experience being more than just the presents left by Santa, the iPod experience is more than just the physical device (small and sexy as it is). It begins with the box – not just a box but a package that speak the Apple brand. Formed like a cardboard CD container, the iPod sits in a recess on one side with the cables and CD in a carton the other side. The cables are kept tidy not by ties but by a purpose designed plastic plug cover / gripper. The headphone covers are in individual sachets. All very designed. All very cool.

I assumed the iPod would require charging before it would work. No, it is ready charged – ready to go. And then the iPod interface being so simple and intuitive to use meant that the experience from no-iPod to iPod-pro was seamless, as though we’ve always used iPods. Compare this to the iRiver I’ve got, with an interface I still haven’t got to grips with. I’m now sold on the Apple brand. Yes, the product is good, but it is the little things around it that make the difference.

And so it should be with software. Not just an application but a total, compelling experience from installation to daily use.

Christmas shopping experience

  • Sunday, 18 December, 2005
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December 18, 2005, 11:45 am

Finishing off my christmas shopping -all done over the web- Buying toys for our two year old, India and I went to Early Learning Centre. The whole experience was excellent, these guys have got a first class web site from the design and implementation of the shop through to the shopping cart there is little you can fault about it and much to learn. I was impressed!

User journeys

  • Wednesday, 14 December, 2005
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December 14, 2005, 11:55 am

One of the issues with dealing with functionality, especially when working on B2C web sites is that it does not always fit comfortably into the broader customer proposition. Functionality is only useful in the context of what a customer wants to do at a site and how they do it. Chances are customers won’t hit that functionality straight away, it will be but one component within their overall journey. For example a shopping cart is the final stage of the buying process. The customer has to firstly find a desired product to put in the cart. The cart’s value is only truly realised when the end to end process is considered – what use is great functionality if the path to reach it is broken? So by thinking about customer journeys, (scenarios by which different customer types will come to the web site and the paths they will take to accomplish their goals) we can ensure that functionality we write cards for has demonstrable value and contributes to a usable and compelling experience. And this helps better prioritisation.

During prioritisation exercises we shuffle the cards according to their business value. Rather than trying to find business value on individual cards, taking this end to end approach will helps us to better estimate the business value of what we are building. And it might make for surprising decisions.

This is something that I tried at a recent financial services client. When we began scoping the work for the forthcoming releases we had a list of important sounding requirements that were to be migrated to their new platform. But how do you prioritise “set income flag” against “capture Debit card details”. Answer was you don’t. Each is part of a customer journey – “existing customer wants to view her accounts” and “new customer want to buy an ISA”. And like a stuck record I interrupted every conversation with “yeah but…. Customer journey” and soon our roadmap for the future was built around journeys. It was the journeys themselves that were prioritised rather than a random bunch of requirements. And what a sexy, customer-centric roadmap it was. Sadly it was later torpedoed by functional requirements that we had no control over and the journeys lost their strong flavour.

Polite Computing

  • Monday, 12 December, 2005
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December 12, 2005, 10:53 pm

I’m lucky enough to have a new Dell D610. It was lightning fast to boot up when I first got it, but now it is like a tortoise. I sit tapping my fingers waiting for Windows to power-up. Why? One reason is that I’m waiting for impolite software to load up in my task bar. “If software that took over your computer for its own purposes were a person it would be called selfish” writes Brian Whitworth in a paper for the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. The most impolite, selfish software on my machine is currently Real media player. It weasled its way on to my machine when I visited a multi-media site (bbc.co.uk I think, no, nothing smutty). And then started squatting, filling my clean machine with garbage. Weatherbug? Eh? Real does this because it can, not because I have asked it to. When we design software we should bear this in mind. An application should offer utility (does what it says on the tin), be usable, and be polite.

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