John McRee – UXD

Tom Fishburne is a genius.  I love his work. I saw this one going around again recently:

It’s funny because it’s true. A friend of mine was working with a client recently who could be characterized by all of these. It sounded painful for sure. Even one of these can be difficult to deal with if they are very passionate about their opinions.

The best way of dealing with this type of client is to have some real end-user research to back up your stance. I have seen it happen again and again – when you can tell a client that your solution isn’t simply what you think is a good idea, but what their customers think is a good idea, you have effectively removed ego from the equation. There’s nothing left to argue about. If you can identify that you have a client like this early on in the project, you can introduce some finding from research early on to help put an end to this behavior before it really becomes a problem.

In a recent article on Wired:

Customer satisfaction with online banking sites has risen significantly over the past five years, according to a survey released Tuesday by ForeSee Results. ForeSee’s survey uses the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, and this year, the index registered a score of 82 out of 100 for online banking, up 12 percent, or 9 points, from a score of 73 in 2003…

Web site technology is expensive, Freed said, but the payback is significant. The same survey showed that highly satisfied online banking customers are 31 percent more likely to buy additional services from the bank and 54 percent more likely to recommend the bank to others.

So there you have it. Another example of ROI on building a good user experience.

Boyscout Motto applies here.

Sometimes tracking down end users can be challenging, expensive, or even prohibited by the client (strange, but true… I’ve been on more than a couple of projects where clients simply didn’t want anyone interfacing with their users).

The next best person to interview is a subject matter expert, or SME.  These can be product managers, sales people, call center reps, or even folks who work in a parallel industry.

While working on an online yearbook design application, I gained a lot of insight from sales people about chronology of tasks, criticality of features, and even quite a bit about pain points with the existing software.  The app could have been designed with this information alone, and we would have something similar to what is currently being built.

What you can’t learn from a SME, however, is what motivates the users.  Understanding user goals and motivation to behavior is extremely powerful, and can take a product from good to great.