User experience isn’t just a one time thing — everytime you use an application or website, they get to know the brand for better or for worse. Bad customer service can also affect user experience.
When something really bad happens (say, your site goes down for hours or days like eBay, Amazon, and MySpace have all experienced), there are three simple rules to follow.
The last thing a customer wants to hear is that it isn’t your fault, especially when it is. Google, one of the largest email providers in the world, had issues with Gmail the other day — and said they were sorry. Like it or not, email for many of us is a very personal experience, and the Gmail Product team acknowledged that.
I had an issue with United Airlines (and Expedia) over a mis-booked ticket. United did a really good job making my life easier and rebooking the ticket so there wasn’t an issue.
Some companies are completely open about some of the issues they are having. Dreamhost had a billing issue earlier this year, and they posted about what happened, and how they were going to fix it. Because of their honesty and candor, I personally like them as one of the better companies out there (and so do many of their companies). Their blog is amazing for company news, and that makes me a happy customer.
MySpace does it all the time. We all know it’s not the most stable platform, but it’s gotten much better over the last few years, and even when there are issues, they publish notices notifying users about the issues with the system, and that it will be fixed soon. MySpace is a bit different because of the informal nature of how they speak to their audience, but they do speak to their audience in language their audience understands, and not some obscure error message.
What Google didn’t do very well was explain what the issue was, which is ironic, because many of the Google users are very technically savvy, and know when they’re being given a line, or something else is being used as an excuse.
All end users want is to be told, “this is how we’re going to make your life easier.” They don’t want excuses of how the weather affected their flight, or why their credit card number was being resold to Indonesians and Romanians. They just don’t want to happen again. You might not be able to prevent it again, but you can take steps to lessen the chance.
From a press release, or actually a study:
The recent publication of a new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company Application Performance Management: The Lifecycle Approach Brings IT and Business Together, further signals the increasing need for real end user experience solutions. Aberdeen’s latest findings show that 50 percent of revenue loss is a result of poor Application Performance. In addition, the enterprises surveyed by Aberdeen clearly ranked the ability to identify end user problems as the top priority for any Application Performance Management initiative.
…
“Best-in-Class organizations are taking an additional critical step and are measuring application performance not only from the perspective of their data center components, but also from the end user perspective. These organizations are ensuring that improvements in application availability, response times and usability translate into improved employee satisfaction and productivity, and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction, mitigation of lost revenue opportunities, and avoid damages to brand image,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst at Aberdeen.
This goes under — duh.
Of course poor user experience can result from a website, web application, or software application that’s slow, has incoherent error messages or just plain breaks. Users don’t know the difference between what’s a bug and what’s not, or why the application is performing slowly.
So, repeat after me:
The first rule of user experience is that the application should actually work.
I wonder how much they are charging for that report. I need to start writing white papers.
To my surprise, United Airlines is working with on the airline ticket issue. They understood my frustration, and want to resolve it because it is something that falls through the cracks. What they don’t know is this trip is for my friend’s 40th birthday. The irony of this is that my friend’s name is so rare, I don’t see how anyone can claim that we’re changing it to someone else.
If this goes through, I will tell everyone I know about the wonderful customer experience I had with United Airlines. Now they are going to work with Air Canada to change this. At least I didn’t spend $5,000 for a ticket like someone else did on Delta.
Companies don’t reach out to customers enough, and it even happens in the line of work that I do — we promise the customer X and the customer receives Y. It’s truly becoming a world where companies are taking the tact of “this is what you are going to get.” Seth Godin has a post on this regarding voice systems titled, “Should you fire the voice mail guy?” I now deal with them all the time when booking travel, and always have issues with them because I have a slight speech impedement.
Customers desperately want a great customer experience, so much so that word of mouth sites are very successful (i.e. Yelp).
Another story I relayed to a client: there have been studies done that when dealing with a website, the last thing people want to do is pick up the phone (or, can you spot a phone number anywhere on eBay or Amazon for customer service). They don’t want to send an email. What they really want to do is find an answer right then.
Additionally, people forget that internal customers are just as important as external customers. Read on over at Signal vs. Noise. When running an intranet, the less people bug you for a document and the more they can find on their own, not only does it make them happier with their job satisfaction, it saves the company or organization money and makes the more productive.
Case in point: When I was a product manager at Escrow.com, we added reams of frequently asked questions, rewrote every single email so it was easy to understand, and guess what? Not only did customer touches drop 33 percent (customer touches defined as an email or phone call into the call center), but walk-up business to the site went up 25 percent per month, to the point where Escrow.com is now a profitable business.
Happy customers mean more customers. More customers mean more happy customers. You know what I mean?
I flew Virgin America on the advice of a friend, and it was the best decision I’ve made in a while.
Everything was a great customer experience — I was able to upgrade my seats easily through their customer service department, the flights were great, they were on time, the food was off the charts (okay, it was First Class, but I’ve flown First Class before, and they never had anything like what they served), and best of all…
I forgot I was on a plane. I hate flying not because I don’t think it’s unsafe (I think it’s very safe), but because the experience is such a nightmare. Crowded seats, limited entertainment options, the feeling that I’m just wasting a few hours of my life, none of that was happening here.
On top of it, the media entertainment system is great. I had actually seen it years ago before they launched the airline through a friend, so I had a good idea of what they were doing, but still, it was really easy to use, and provided some great options without me having to reach for a credit card. They got it.
Thank you, Virgin America, and I’m not just saying this because you can follow their twitter feed, either. I will fly you again, and tell all my friends.
This past weekend, I was in San Francisco for a client meeting, conference and some pre-sales work. As usual, I had forgotten to buy some music I wanted to listen to over the weekend, and my MacBook (the personal computer with all the music) was 400 miles away.
What did I do? Did what any self-respecting iPod Touch user would do: bought the music anyways through WiFi. It took me less than two minutes to go through the purchase process, truly an impulse buy that all music vendors aspire to.
Something so simple as buying music through thin air is another reason why Apple is so far ahead of the pack: the iPod experience connected to iTunes are clearly such a superior experience that other vendors are going to have a hard time catching up.
In other words, Apple has figured out how to sell out how to sell the razors and razorblades — clearly how usability and a superior user experience leads to a better bottom line.
We could use the Nielsen Norman group definition…
“User Experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.
…because, well, they get paid a lot of money.
But, I like to keep things simple. This is what User Experience means to me:
For quite a while, I drove a BMW Z4. It’s a nice car, but most amazing is the placement of the cupholders: they’re right underneath the left and right air conditioning and heating vents, and when you pressed on them, they would pop out. Among all the other things that the car had — a lot of power, a stereo that would increase in volume when the car was going faster, seat warmers, and a power top, excellent handling — it was the little things like the cup holders that made it an excellent user experience. In the time I drove that car (for several years), I never spilled a drink.
The Z4 was in the shop for a while, and I rented a Chevy Aveo for almost three months. Among other things about the car (other than the running joke that a friend of mine came up with a different name for it every time he talked about it) I didn’t like, the cup holders were in the middle, between the seats. I spilled drinks in that car five times. The were a lot of things I didn’t like about the car (poor handling, uncomfortable seating, brakes that were similar to what Fred Flinstone had to do), but what stuck out most was the cup holders.
That’s what user experience means to me — you never know what the end users are going to complain about or like about your product, but you do know that everything they see is something that could be criticized as a poor user experience. It could be that the product crashes every five minutes, or that help text was poorly written, or that it takes ten steps to go through something that should take five, it’s the complete experience. It should even be to the level that users don’t know they want a feature, but it works just as they expect it to.
User Experience specialists act as holistic evaluators and product managers that recognize any that could limit the effectiveness of the product. In that sense, User Experience architects act as gatekeepers, working with all teams (Development, Quality Assurance and Marketing) to make sure what goes out the door is an excellent product.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
