Who’s really looking out for your customers?

Jay Peters

Senior Interactive Planner & Strategist

Denali Marketing

jay.peters@denalimarketing.com

denalimarketing.com

Topic: Marketing/ Communications

Your company is setting out on a new interactive project and you've assembled an A-Team made up of the usual suspects. 

 
Among the core contributors: brilliant marketers who set strategy and tie the actions of the website back to the goals of the business; talented Creatives who make sure the site is on-brand and impactful; top-notch programmers who write code and focus on complex issues like security and bandwidth.
 
Everyone is happy. The site works hard for the business team. It's beautiful. And it's secure. But is the experience good for the customer?
 
We are in an age of websites, WAPs, apps, and widgets and interactions are more dynamic than ever. Your experience may be very different than mine - even on the same page of the same website.
 
This is not to say the aforementioned talent isn't thinking about the customer or advocating for a good experience. Typically, there are pages and pages of requirements that we gather to ensure that we ARE thinking about them. And no one sets out to advertently design websites that are hard to use or are confusing.
 
But it happens all the time.
 
Enter User Experience

It's hard to pin down who this person is. There are relatively few structured educational programs that are placing user experience experts into companies. Many of the best user experience experts I know are drifters. They started in marketing. Or they have a background in forestry. You get the idea... Our society's definition of an expert usually aligns with an ability to be "formally trained or educated." And with user experience, that's often not the case.
 
To add to the problem a user experience - as defined by Wikipedia - is "how a person feels about a system" and is often "subjective." Sure there are often wireframes and sitemaps backed up by research for documented support, but getting the CEO to buy into customer feelings and emotions from someone with a background in forestry is often a daunting task.
 
This leads many companies down the path of either ignoring user experience completely, or relegating the responsibility it entails to a traditional designer or marketer.
 
Why is this a problem? Three words:  Conflict of interest.
 
The traditional designer is sometimes (news flash) more concerned with the look of a website than how a user interacts with it.  In their mind, if it's beautiful and impactful, they have done their job. (There are talented Creatives who disprove this belief - many of whom I have met.)
 
And at the end of the day, marketers are looking out for the business. They are juggling their magical P's of marketing trying to get us to buy more - and more often. 
What this all means is that sometimes the users' end goals are tossed to the wayside and replaced with our own goals.  
 
Here are a couple of examples:
 
The customer wants to register and get in quickly, and the marketer wants to ask a series of questions to gather more data. This is a conflict of interest which often results in a poor user experience.
 
Or, the customer just wants to purchase our product, and we want them create an account first. Conflict of interest. Poor user experience.
  
I'm not trying to convince you to build a website that doesn't address or achieve your business goals and only makes things "easy for the customer."
 
Instead, concentrate on striking a balance between the two - your goals and theirs. And if you are lucky enough for these goals to coincide, then you've struck gold. And in doing so, you may find that the better experience you offer may actually create a stronger bond with your customer.
 
Websites have thousands of interactions and touch points. Think about the paths users take through our sites as a friendly conversation where we are simply there to help. Help them complete their task - whether it's an enrollment or a transaction - and get them on their way.
 
For your next interactive project, dedicate resources to the user experience. Dedicate a person (a devil's advocate if you will) to do nothing but advocate for the customer's experience with your interactive property.  
 
You'll be happy you did. 

2010-06-12 00:00:00 -0500