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Serving customers in the long term
What happens when customers want the wrong thing?
For example, in the current issue of the New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes that most consumer electronics are horribly complicated because, in part, they sell better:
...as numerous studies have shown, people are not, in general, good at predicting what will make them happy in the future. As a result, we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we'll use them. We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works.
In other words, the more features are packed into a product, the better it may sell, at least in the short term. Customers thus pay to get "the wrong thing" - the device they can't use, the software they'll never figure out - and companies then suffer, too, from unnecessary product returns, support calls, and poor word-of-mouth.
One possible response is to pack yet more features into a product, to sell even more units (in the short term) and help offset the increased costs of tech support and product returns. Taken to an extreme, a company can take this approach to all aspects of its operations: branding, marketing, packaging, as well as product design. Then at least the whole company is consistently following the same strategy.
Take, for instance, this (now well-known) parody of iPod packaging, if it was created by Microsoft:
This can be mistaken for a customer-centered approach. The thinking goes like this: customers tend to buy products with more features, and "the customer is always right," so the customer-centered strategy must be to pack everything with lots of unnecessary features... right?
I don't think so. Apart from the colossal waste of resources (physical, environmental, and financial) it requires, the main problem with this approach is the lack of long-term vision for the company or the customer.
The challenge is for the company to look beyond the short term to what will affect its prospects further on. (A short-term sales spike doesn't mean much, if half the products get returned a few weeks later.) A company's best bet, in the long run, is to deliver what customers really want: and that often isn't an endless list of features, but a genuine benefit - like productivity - or better communications - or some new skill. Delivering on the long-term value might require more disciplined product development, but it pays out in the end.
In other words: a strategic focus on creating a good customer experience - that is, acting in the long-term best interest of the customer - is the most effective investment any team or company can make.
The benefit of a customer experience strategy, by the way, is made stronger by the relative lack of companies that use such an approach. Many companies - most of one's competitors, in other words - still chase after short-term numbers by latching onto buzzwords, trends, and anything shiny. (See my note on the current Windows Mobile ad campaign.) It's an enticing opportunity - building a business by giving customers what they really want, not necessarily what they reach for in the short term.
It's useful to note that the "iPod as packaged by Microsoft" video was created by Microsoft - see http://www.ipodobserver.com/story/25957.
Their Vista and Office 2007 packaging seems to have been informed by the lesson, and you could arguee that both of their UIs have been as well - search as application launcher in Vista for example.
While I agree that designing products that are simpler and include fewer features would be great, I also think the reality is that products with more features really do sell better. This is especially true if it's a product category with a lot of "innovation" or at least a lot of new capabilities. This could include smart phones, software, HD TVs, etc. In this case there are new features that I've never experience before so I don't know if I really need them or not. My tendency, therefore, is to go ahead and get the product with more features just in case one or more of them really proves to be valuable.
When designing these products though, a third option would be to include all the features but "protect" the user from the more "advanced" ones until the user wants to try them out. By this I mean make the core functionality really easy to find and use without having to wade through the functionality they may but probably won't use. This approach allows the use to quickly get most of the value of the product but also gives them the option of expanding out (if/when they want to) and trying some of those other 100 features listed on the box.
good point, matt - that's essentially what i suggest in my note to developers in "Bit Literacy" - http://www.bitliteracy.com
Great post!
What we have been struck with at ActiveWords is how even when I think we have abided by your core suggestions, we find a huge unwilligness on the part of people to modify their behavior even a tiny bit when to do so might result in huge productivity gains.
We have found that by building "WordBases" that our users can edit/rename adds for building cool functionality into our core application.
But again solving the adoption puzzle is what I think we agonize over most
I think an important point of this discussion is the quest to understand what customers *need* rather than what they *want*. This subtle distinction helps one move past the short-term temptations and on to the long-term value that is so highly prized. To quote Chris Halliwell of Caltech (http://www.irc.caltech.edu/leaders/halliwell.htm) if you ask a customer what they want, they'll always tell you "feature, feature, feature, price". But if you spend some quality time with them to discuss what they need, you can focus on the essential items that lead to a good experience.