« The Friction in Frictionless Sharing | Main | Let's Not Screw Up Mobile Privacy »

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Great idea, Nick -- I love it!

We've gotten into the habit of having developers spending one day a week on the help desk. Not only humbling (our shortcommings and limited horizons being exposed) and often maddening (customer's can't really be that stupid), but the lessons learned, while often bruising to our egos, has, over time and in small ways improved the quality of the products and,perhaps more importantly, provided insights into worldviews and expectations of others.

@Chuck I think that's a great way to get developers to better understand their customers - see http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/if-you-want-to-write-useful-software-you-have-to-do-tech-support.html

One of the things I've found talking to people is that they often don't even know the basic vocabulary needed to communicate a problem. Seems to me that if we're going to trade fixing their computers for talking, they should buy beer, and lots of it for the talking part. :) At least that way it dulls the pain of trying to figure the infinite ways that "my computer" can be used. :)

"One of the things I've found talking to people is that they often don't even know the basic vocabulary needed to communicate a problem".

Honestly, I would say that that is even more of an indication that an application or device needs to be changed or redesigned. In the ideal world, a program should be able to teach the user its vocabulary so when they call and say "the whizzit on the framistan menu blinks" you are both talking about the same whizzit and framistan.

I know this isn't an ideal world and you can't do that perfectly, but by talking to the user in that kind of situation, maybe you can come to an understanding WHY they are describing it the way they are - maybe it's something you can change, but maybe not. In either case, you have learned something valuable from the user.

The comments to this entry are closed.