Attended a Thoughtworks presentation this morning - "Your first mistake - underestimating the customer experience".  Interesting way at looking at why customers choose between products and companies.  The gust of the presentation was that companies need to look beyond competing on price, quality and time to market, and look at differentiating your product based on not just whether the product does the job, but the entire customer experience - from hitting the website, to installing or using the product, to customer service when having issues.

The factor contributing to this change in focus is the impact that Web 2.0 has on assisting customers to choose brands and products.  With growing numbers of people writing reviews, blogs, participating in forums, and generally publishing information - word of mouth is now reaching many many more ears.  Whilst in the past you might get newspaper reviews, or a personal recommendation, now you can Google virtually any product and find out what other customer experiences have been had with that product.

A brief rehash follows...

Designing for everybody pleases nobody

It's important to consider who you are targeting as customers.  Ideally, the ones with the most money to spend, the ones that are easy to attract, and require the least amount of effort to maintain.

Once these customers are identified, research is required to really find out what motivates them.  From market research, with its corresponding downside (don't actually do what they say they do), through contextual research (finding out how they use your product, (or similar)), right through to "ethnographic" research (really getting out there and following your customers and finding out what motivates them to choose a product).

At this point it's important to build a customer profile.  This helps to identify the customer, and make them a real person.  'I want to be a real boy" -Pinnocio.  Make these customers obvious and display the profile.

Identify

• Demographic
• Interaction Experience
• Attitudes to task and technology
• Goals
• Experience Statements
• Environment (where is the product used)

Goals are the new features

I wasn't really sure how the tagline related to the content, but the content was definitely relevant.  Essentially, like any good analyst, focus on identifying the customers "want", "need", and "feel" words to help identify there goals.  Also try and identify their frustrations.

Possibly relate to Maslows needs hierarchy - when all the basic requirements are met... then what does the customer look for?

Some ideas

• Motivation
• Practical Need
• Brand / image
• Environment
• Emotional Need
• Interaction
• Social Need

They also touched on capturing user goals using stories - something along the lines of
As a <Customer type>
I want to <action>
so I can <goal>

Finally, it was a matter of prioritising the user goals - high value, low cost -> high value, high cost, -> low value, low cost -> low value, high cost.  (Guess which ones don't get done!)

Useability is not rocket science

I kind of found that a bit condescending, but again, the content was excellent.  It focussed around "eating your own dogfood".  ie - act as a user and use your site, product, service to see how user centric or goal focussed it is.

They did an 8 second blip of the Surf Lifesaving South Australia website.  I am a beach goer and I want to view the site so that I can donate some money.  8 seconds display... can you find it?  (Donate was very well hidden away).  To be fair to Surf Lifesaving SA, maybe their target user wasn't somebody donating but somebody wanting to become a member.  (See point 1 - design for everybody pleases nobody)

Also, I liked the point about using natural language - illustrated quite amusingly by using a Virgin Blue hostess comment about the emergency exit door...  "If I say get out... open the door quickly."  That struck a cord with me as I'm a big fan of avoiding buzzwords and wank words when not needed.  (My pet peeve is "If you need assistance please do not hesitate to ask".  Which is wank phrase for - "Ask if you need help").  Politeness CAN obscure the message.

Another point made that I appreciated is that the product should be consistent across all mediums.  If you login to a site and start an application, you should be able to complete that same application over the phone (if a phone service is provided).

Leverage Web 2.0

Maybe my attention span is short, but I found that the presentation started to wander at this point.  The crux of it was to pay attention to Web 2.0 features like forums, mashups, blogs and review sites where users contribute, and use those to help with points 1, 2 and 3. 

• Noted that consumer publications and media was no longer as trusted
• Peer reviews were preferred forms of information
• Noted businesses starting to have Facebook pages to provide a peer style site and promote the brand
• Use the internet to identify competitors and find information about it.

Change

"The only constant is change".  This last section wandered the most, and it became a little trite.  Essentially it was about making change part of the process, and making it evolutionary rather than big bang.  It's more approachable that way.

All up though, I found the presentation quite informative and some of the techniques very useful.  I can't say that there were any bombshells and a lot of it's common sense, but sometimes it takes an external party to make you realise what you're missing - and for that, it was definitely a good thing.