Sunday, June 26, 2005
Visit at the first front
A visit to the operators first line support and customer operations last week was really an eye opener. I found that as a developer you are completely blind when releasing a new service, you think you have thought of everything that customers can do wrong, you have had countless of meetings trying to think about which customers that will take the service, and how they will use it. But you miss so much.
Why do developers miss things like putting the answer button on a softphone in the wrong place or information on is soo bad that the users don't understand how they should connect the cables to their DSL modem.
One reason is that marketing and sells personnel wants to start selling the service as fast as possible, sometimes the product is not even finished before it is being started to be sold. This puts enormous pressure on the developers for making the service ready on time, and usually they focus on making it work without any serious bugs, but it does not mean it is very user friendly.
A friendly user test (FUT) is sometimes done, the developers let their family and friends try out the service for a while. In the best case the test is allowed to run for two to three weeks. This is never enough.
What came to me when listening to a seventy year old man who had just ordered the DSL service was that you should let the users into the development process as soon as possible. Seventy year old people are usually not participants in a friendly user test, I can not think about the questions they might have and what they think is easy to understand.
So in my next project I will try to send out the suggested user interactions that are required already in the planning stage to some friends to start with, then when it is actually possible to test the service, I will try to get people to try out the first two, three features that are finished and keep that iteration until it is time for a real FUT. And then when the service is launched I have to listen in on first line support and try to pick up all the problems the poor customers seems to have. Then I hope I can finally release a service that is nuthead proof.
Why do developers miss things like putting the answer button on a softphone in the wrong place or information on is soo bad that the users don't understand how they should connect the cables to their DSL modem.
One reason is that marketing and sells personnel wants to start selling the service as fast as possible, sometimes the product is not even finished before it is being started to be sold. This puts enormous pressure on the developers for making the service ready on time, and usually they focus on making it work without any serious bugs, but it does not mean it is very user friendly.
A friendly user test (FUT) is sometimes done, the developers let their family and friends try out the service for a while. In the best case the test is allowed to run for two to three weeks. This is never enough.
What came to me when listening to a seventy year old man who had just ordered the DSL service was that you should let the users into the development process as soon as possible. Seventy year old people are usually not participants in a friendly user test, I can not think about the questions they might have and what they think is easy to understand.
So in my next project I will try to send out the suggested user interactions that are required already in the planning stage to some friends to start with, then when it is actually possible to test the service, I will try to get people to try out the first two, three features that are finished and keep that iteration until it is time for a real FUT. And then when the service is launched I have to listen in on first line support and try to pick up all the problems the poor customers seems to have. Then I hope I can finally release a service that is nuthead proof.
# posted by Maria jernström @ 6/26/2005 04:23:00 PM 
