What would happen if we involved the User in the User Interface?

If you haven't read Mark Hurst's Good Experience site and you sell things Online, or just care about your customers, visit today. In this column, part of today's eNewsletter, Mark has identified a situation many of us can relate to if we are in the role of change agent.

Good Experience - The Most Important User Experience Method tells what can happen when an organization is not changed along with the user interface. My favorite quote from the article, is Mark's astute observation that, "Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work."


Said another way: you can give the smartest answers in the world, make the most brilliant recommendations; but if the organization doesn't actually change the user experience, it's all worthless. Your final report, nicely printed and bound, with such carefully chosen words, will gather dust in some forgotten pile, forever."

If we are not able to sell the benefits of using new Web functionality, new CRM systems, or any other User Interface improvement internally, then users will work around the system, and not use it to its full potential.

There are many reasons user empowerment (both customer self-service and internal process automation) can be threatening to an organization, and especially to those who manage the processes being automated.

For that reason, radical change needs, in my opinion, to start with a careful observation of the real areas that are causing you and your customers pain in doing business. Let those who feel the pain participate in helping solve it, whether they are customers or employees. You can use Web Analytics, call observations, and sales data to find out what's really going on, as opposed to surveys, since customers responding to surveys can be either overly nice so as not to hurt our feelings, or overly harsh, with an agenda.

Either way, survey responders feel strongly about your company. Those who are strongly positive should be encouraged to share their experience. Those with negative feedback should be listened to and learned from. Those in the middle, though, are the ones who came to your site once, may or may not have purchased from you, and may or may not come back. Finding out why they left can help you improve your site, and better define your unique value within your niche.