Our Customer Is Wrong
“I don’t understand our customer. They want us to make the interface like that. But that’s far from optimal design.”
“I guess they have some reasons to do it like that.”
“It’s completely unintuitive that way. Look you have to choose from several hundreds of options from drop-down until you can go further. They said they want it exactly the same like in the legacy system.”
“Um... As far as I know their end-users aren’t very fluent with using a computer. Maybe they followed exactly the same scenario for years by now and it would be hard to retrain them, even if the new one is better. I guess, that can be why the customer doesn’t want any changes here.”
“You know, that can be a reason. I haven’t considered it that way.”
Look broader. Accept you can be mistaken. Trust in knowledge of your customer. Customer is (almost) always right.
2 comments:
Hi,
you´ve right. The customer is that person, who pays for that piece of software. And he pays normally much more, than for something standardly. So he has to have the right get such interface he wants. Normally is this a UI which is based on his experience and his worker usually know how to use such UI, because this UI is based on their work done for last X years.
And at last: the customer is King. And when he is happy about our work, then he will recommend us to the partners.
So it´s what I think about relationship Softwarehouse <-> customer.
Waldemar
I think the trap is that we, as people with usually much better better technical background and much better knowledge about software, fall in a trap of thinking about a project from the software perspective.
On the other hand, customers have usually much better knowledge about their users and they tend to look from that perspective.
When I confront software versus user I believe the latter is more important. That doesn't mean you shouldn't advice the customer to improve software, but if they insist on doing something, they are right. And that's what they pay for anyway.
Btw: don't you think that users' habits are vastly underestimated?
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