Tag Archives: customer visits

Customer Visit Success

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Boy have I been busy! My customer visits in the North East went swimmingly, but it was extremely hectic. I travelled to 4 states in 4 days and interviewed 6 customers. We started with Morgan Stanley, and then Bloomberg in New York. Then drove to New Jersey, and met with US News (Dow Jones) and Susquhanna Investment Group in PA. Then drove to Jersey City for Lord Abbott and up to Purdue Pharma in Connecticut.

My tools for the interview was a Sansa recorder, a notepad and pen. Our clients all had different work styles, environments and processes. There was one thing I was very happy about, and that was how nice and patient everyone was during the interview process. Everyone was more than amicable to take the time to answer our questions, it was almost like we were providing them with psychiatric treatment where they could unleash all of their IT problems.

I’m glad that I got the experience of going to customer interviews on this trip, I learned so much about our products, how they are being used, and about our customers. I took the customer data that I collected and assembled it into a call report. I also think that my relationship with product development has grown from this experience.

Now that I have collected user data first-hand. I am interested in viewing some of the previously collected user data and generating a mental model of this material. Unfortunately I don’t know if I will have the time to work on it.

Also, tonight, I will be giving a speech at RefreshMiami on Human Factors. This is at Yahoo Latin America in Coral Gables. It will just be a 10-15 minute speech on what a Human Factors Engineer does.

Why does User Experience lack credibility in some circles?

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This morning I read an article in Billing & OSS World Magazine about User Experience. The title of the article was Copping the ‘Customer Experience’ Buzzword and this is how the article began…

“I hate when I succumb to the use of buzzwords. So I came reluctantly to the term “customer experience.” It always struck me as psycho-babble B.S. — and I don’t mean Bachelor of Science — that some precocious second-year grad from the Acme School of Business Management came up with to get a bunch of old techheads to stop thinking about their icky old networks. And thinking it impossible to ever accurately measure the quality of individual or collective experiences, I cringed every time I let the phrase slip into an article, thinking myself a shill for whichever nameless marketeer had coined it.”

So my question is what has happened to this individual and to usability that would create this type of impression to anyone. One of my goals as a UX Evangelist has been to take the mystery out of usability and to make it understandable and digestible by everyone. I mean usability affects every aspect of our life, why would it be so intimidating, or what would have caused it to lose credibility, and be described as a buzz-word of all things?! Is it because good usability makes things so seamless to use that people don’t even notice it?

By the end of the article the author acknowledges that usability is becoming more credible and that more companies are investing in it. But it still seems like this is an area that remains mysterious to many of whom do not understand it. People seem to understand the concept of convenience, why do they not understand ease of use?

As this blog grows, I hope to take away some of the mystery of usability. I know I haven’t gotten into it very deep so far, and most of my messages have discussed methodologies, and the whatnot without getting very detailed, but this is because I’ve been waiting to practice some of the processes, and provide some real feedback about my experiences and have some real content to discuss. Hopefully this will all come to fruition next week as I will be in NYC on customer visits.