Understanding the user perspective is essential for achieving user satisfaction

Understanding the user perspective is essential for achieving user satisfaction

When we work in a product or service industry, it is essential to understand how the end user perceives our product or service. Sometimes, it becomes essential to go back to basics and define who the end user is. Many times in our usual day-to-day work, we’re busy dealing with deadlines, issues and problems at hand, and the user perspective takes a back seat. That can become a potentially large problem. Organizations seek customer feedback and keep track of CSAT (customer satisfaction). However in my experience, nothing beats visiting the client in their own space and observing how your product or service is used. We have read stories of CEOs trading places with customer service employees of call centers to get first-hand experience of the service or serving burgers/coffee at the chain outlets for a day. Not only the CEOs but other employees also, need to get into the end user’s shoes to know how the end user gets serviced. We have read stories of benevolent kings disguising themselves as commoners and visiting the city to see how the commoners were faring? This is the same principle! In our organization, we had a practice for each manager to visit at least two clients in a month. On one such visit, I was with a client who was not very popular in our service team. The client always questioned everything and wanted things done only his way. On this visit, the client showed me how his window remained open after completing a certain task. I had never experienced this issue myself. After digging into the problem, I found that the client used Firefox, whereas we used Chrome. When I came back to the office, I immediately called a high level meeting, where we agreed that our end user experience should be identical regardless of browser. This would mean additional coding and testing, but it had to be done. Had I not seen the issue myself, I would have just chalked the problem down to ‘some clients are never happy’. On another occasion, I visited a client and noticed that their home screen and dashboard was largely empty with only a few dashlets and menu options available. The client had opted for our limited service, planning to opt for other modules after a few months. Fair enough. I was used to seeing the complete dashboard with all dashlets so I had never seen the limited service screen with limited menu. It was time to go back to the drawing board and design in such a way that, limited service or not, the screen would be attractively rendered. Putting oneself in the user’s shoes and experiencing through the end user’s perspective is absolutely essential to achieve user satisfaction. Have you ever reconsidered your product or service after seeing it from the user’s perspective? (Disclaimer — the IT industry is known to use words such as ‘dashlet’ and ‘backend’. One of my linguist friends was horrified when someone told her that the backend database was corrupted. ‘Not polite’, she exclaimed!) .